The Road To Beauty Is A Long

And Thin One Essay, Research Paper

The definition of beauty as found in “Websters New World Dictionary” is, “Beauty- 1. the quality of being pleasing, as in form, color, etc. 2.a thing with this quality. 3. good looks. 4. a very attractive person, feautre, etc.” The concepts of beauty were first described by the anicient greeks. The classical values pushed order and serenity. Greek philosphers Plato and Socrates were attempting to define beauty. They thought of objects or nature as being inherently beautiful: beauty is inside the object, “The beauty within an object is it’s pure and ideal beauty”. In our present time beauty no longer resides inside. It in completely outlying. The road to become beauty is a long, hard and most importantly thin road. Being thin is the biggest emphasis on people today. In earlier times thin was not that in. Fuller figured women were the ideal picture of gorgeous. Now you have to be a twig to be comsidered beautiful.

Society keeps pushing the emphasis on being thin. Through magazines, ads to lose weight, hundreds of diets and phone numbers to aide in this fight against fat. They are being nothing but deleterious. Also in the magazines the skinny models who are the picture of perfect in their glamorous clothes and makeup. The tall thin legs and high cheek bones. Television is also a major contributer to this obsession people have today with losing weight. Turn on the television and what is seen. Youthful boney models and actors running around in barely anything to sell a can of soup. A Jenny Craig commercial to remind poeple of what a minority they are and how they must strive and pay her money so they can be perfect just like everyone else. Even driving, wheter it be to work or a trip to the mall. Giant bilboards are a constant reminder of whats beautiful and whats not. It’s a sick obsession and is taken way too seriously. To the point of death even. People feeling corpulent and are dying to be thin, literally.

It all beings with youth. Adolesence is the most vulnerable point in anyones life. This is where it all starts. Being a teenager is not easy and there are many pressures that they face daily. The feeling of being anomalous.Eating disorders can be very much about control, so if they feel like everything around them is out of control, they may develop one to gain a sense of control. It is important for families to raise the teenager to be proud of who they are and not place any importance on their appearance. Fellow students at school are also part of the prolbem. One child has a faster motabolism than another. One is comstantly reminded how much lower than he or she is just because they aren’t as thin as some one else. Teens need to be able to express all types of emotions. They should be encouraged to do their best, but they should not be expected to be perfect. They need to be encouraged to be themselves and to be proud of who they are, so that they will not give into the pressures from their peers to try and fit in. If they are happy with themselves and love who they are, they will be less likely to try and attain society’s unattainable “ideal” body image, because they will accept their bodies just the way they are. For men, they want to be the big muscled, winsome male that is persued in just about every commercial. Women wany the skinny model look. The truth of the matter is a mojority of people will never be what the ideal image of beauty is. They are not a monirity as they are led to believe. All the talk, advertisments and televisions repitition of this matter lead people to feel beneath others, it gives them a low self esteem and leaves them vulnerable. When this happens, eating disorders develop. People think that eating disorders are bizare and out of the ordianry in actuality there quite common.

What by definition is an eating disorder. An eating disorder is defined as eating for the wrong reason. Not because of hunger and feeding a body. It’s eating out of anxiety, depression or just because. Patients are usually surrectitious about the disorder. not wanting a lot of attention. The most well-known eating disorders are anorexia nervosa and bulimia nervosa.Those affected are mostly young women and girls. People with these eating disorders often have a psychological profile of low self-esteem and feelings of helplessness. They tend to blame their problems on their weight and consequently develop an overwhelming drive to lose weight. Eating disorders are devastating behavioral maladies brought on by a complex interplay of factors, which may include emotional and personality disorders, family pressures, and aculture in which there is anoverabundance of food and anobsession with thinness. Eating disorders are generally categorized as bulimia nervosa, anorexia nervosa, and eating disorders not otherwise specified. These are not new disorders. Although anorexia nervosa was first defined as a medical problem in 1873, descriptions of self-starvation have been found in medieval writings.

Anexoria nervosa is the disorder in which self starvation takes place. With this disorder at least fifteen percent to as much as sixty percent of the normal body weight is lost. Anorexia nervosa is the third most common chronic illness in adolescent women, and is estimated to occur in 0.5 percent to three percent of all teenagers. Anorexia usually occurs in adolescence. However, over the past forty years, while ,the incidence ha