Eating Disorders
Part A of Topic 1
Eating disorders are defined as illnesses experienced by people; their eating habits are affected. Their emotions and thoughts are impacted, and they bury themselves into eating as a way of comforting themselves. Individuals suffering from eating disorders get occupied in their body weight and shape. Women are mostly affected people by eating disorders. Most women live in fear of adding too much weight or being so slender, and eating disorders become their nightmares. Many women like having curvy bodies, and if not, then they get depressed and anxious. Some people’s disorders are eating too much food at a go, while others starve themselves due to anxiety and cannot make themselves stop. Studying eating disorders is of great importance because it would help understand the victims and learn how to help them get treatment and prevent them from getting back to the disorders after treatment. This paper’s drive is to get to learn and understand the causes of eating disorders and ways to treat them. The paper will also help in understanding ways to use to prevent these disorders.
If there is a restriction of food, there are psychological effects that a victim might suffer from. People tend to think that the best way to deal with abnormal eating, consuming too much than it should be, is by starvation and food addition to victims who do not eat enough food as they are supposed to. When an individual is a restricted food, their brain adapts to the scarcity of food, and the psychological state can generate binge-feelings, resulting in impacting the body (Franklin et al., 1948). Also, when the food is available, there’s a feeling, and the binge-feeling has already been created, the victims cannot eat. Their emotions are often triggered by food due to the adaptation of starvation. Lives of the victims starving themselves change due to psychological changes because emotional instability might also lead to depression, fast irritation, unable to concentrate on their activities, anxiety, and nervousness. If the starved persons suffer psychologically, their normal concentration is impacted, affecting their normal lifestyle, and the effects might not stop even after the victims recover from eating disorders. Dieting could be one of the causes of eating disorders because there are many food intake restrictions in the diet. The scarcity of food might result in psychological effects.
Body image is one of the major findings of individuals. It is one of the things that boost confidence in people, especially women. For a person to go out to the world and work on their goals, they need self-love and confidence in themselves. Self-esteem and confidence start from within someone, and if they feel like their bodies aren’t beautiful as they want, then that affects them mentally, thus impact their lives. The mentality of beautiful body images is mostly a result of comparison with other people who seem more beautiful in their body sizes (Want et al., 2009). People need to accept their bodies the way they are and love themselves rather than comparing them. Acceptance is one way of healing from illnesses. Eating disorders can be prevented in various ways, such as avoiding comparisons. People often get carried away by other people’s physiques and want to look like them. If an individual compares themselves to people on, for example, the magazines, they might end up suffering from eating disorders trying to resemble the magazine images. Researchers should not advise people not to watch TV to avoid media effects. A better way of tackling media influence on people resulting in eating disorders is teaching them how to love, accept, and love themselves.
Social anhedonia is defined as a lack of interest in social interactions and a lack of desire in the involvement of anything that is done socially, thus social withdrawal. People suffering from social anhedonia might find their pleasure in food, thus resulting in eating disorders. Others might feel loose social interactions because of their body weight or shape and find pleasure in their only company, hiding from the world because of their physiques. When studying about eating disorders, social anhedonia could help understand the victims of these disorders (Harrison, 2014). I think social anhedonia can be important because most people with eating disorders withdraw from social activities. Lack of social interests could lead people to find pleasure in food or pleasure in food restriction because they spend time alone. Most people with eating disorders have social anhedonia because they feel like the community knows about their problem and laughs at them. With the mentality that everyone knows about their disorders, these people tend to withdraw from the community. A feeling like that everyone is laughing at them leads them to depression, then they isolate themselves and either eat abnormally or starve themselves.
In order to lessen eating disorders, there should be more understanding; therefore, there’s a need for improving research on psychology. Psychology of the people suffering from eating disorders should be studied better so as to get to know how these people operate. Learning the psychology of a person helps to connect with them emotionally. When there’ a connection with a sick person, it becomes easier to offer services to them, and the same case applies to eating disorders victims. If a victim of these disorders feels connected, they would feel they are not alone fighting the illnesses. The feeling of not being alone can help the victims mentally; therefore share their feelings, which is the start of the healing process. With a better understanding of these people’s psychology and interaction, social withdrawal is solved, and a relationship with a victim is established. The best way to know how to deal with people is to know their thinking and how they operate. Learning psychology aims to predict what a person might do, their behavior change, describe an individual and explain who they are in terms of personality. With a good understanding of the psychology of a person suffering from an eating disorder, it would be easier to help them.
Part B of Topic 1
In my opinion, I would propose self-love as a way of preventing and reducing eating disorders. Self-love means that someone loves and appreciates their bodies the way they are and chooses not to listen to what other people say because their shapes don’t define them. If a person focused more on their value, accomplishments, character, talents, and goals, they would not have to deal with eating disorders. The focus should be on what someone can do, their superpowers, rather than how their bodies look. If an individual doesn’t feel bad because of their bodies, then there won’t be a problem with eating disorders.
The main question in my experiment on the study of self-love is, “who will love me if I don’t love myself first.” This idea is important to study because it would help change people’s mentality about their looks, which results in unacceptance from oneself. Love and respect are psychological and originates from within. If someone accepts themselves for whom they are, the community accepts them with much respect. It is important for people to understand this because it would also help prevent anxiety and depression, as well as help, prevent eating disorders. I would encourage people to study self-love.
Women in the university will be the participants in my study. I will choose women because, according to research, ninety percent of people suffering from eating disorders are women. Most women feel like they are not enough because of their weight and body shape, thus suffer from eating disorders. I will use a random sampling method to obtain participants in my study. Picking random strangers will be better and will not depict any biasness. After choosing the participants, anyone who will feel like they do not belong in the study will be free to go, and I’ll be left with willing participants.
My experiment will choose self-worth as the independent variable. I have chosen self-worth because I want the participants to understand that they do not need anything or anyone in order to see themselves as worthy. Food intake will be the dependent variable. This is because I aim to make the participants and women know that food intake depends on hunger and not what because of their body shapes or sizes. I will prefer not to use familiar words in the study but use operational definitions. I will use dietary instead of food-intake and value instead of self-worth. The role of the participants in my experiment is to listen to my ideas and ask questions, which will help me in the future. Participants in the control group will be to create a chain of events connection. I will use an unsystematic numeral generator to allocate members to groups.
If the results of my study came back, I think that they would be having positive results because I would have done my experiment well. These results would be of great help to researchers on ways to prevent and lessen eating disorders because they would have ideas for participants. The ideas would help researchers understand the psychology of people suffering from eating disorders. Researchers would learn that self-worth should be appreciated. Also, my study would have shown that women need more attention because they are the most affected. The shortcomings that I would have experienced would have been a lack of willing participants.
I would address various ethical concerns that should be respected and followed. The ethics would include; honesty, confidentiality, and respect for affected people as well as the participants in the experiment. Honesty should be practiced so that trust is built between the victims and those they talk to for help. Also, confidentiality should be maintained, meaning the information shared should not be given to other people. Everyone should be respected no matter who they are, and therefore respect should be maintained. I would address these ethical concerns by including them in my study paper. With this, different people would get the message.
This paper covers problems and challenges faced by people suffering from eating disorders and ways that can be used to help reduce these disorders or prevent them from happening. I’ve learned that eating disorders are mostly caused by low self- esteem. Many people get anxious and depressed about their bodies, either too fat or too slim, and this causes eating disorders. Eating disorders are psychological but can be treated or prevented from happening. The study that I have proposed would be of great importance if conducted because it portrays a way of understanding people who suffer from eating disorders by involving participants.
References
Franklin, J. C., Schiele, B. C., Brožek, J., & Keys, A. (1948). Observations of human behavior in experimental semistarvation and rehabilitation. Journal of Clinical Psychology, 4, 28-45.
Harrison, A., Mountford, V.A., & Tchanturia, K. (2014). Social anhedonia and work and social functioning in the acute and recovered phases of eating disorders. Psychiatry Research, 218, 187-194.
Want, S. C., Vickers, K., & Amos, J. (2009). The influence of television programs on appearance satisfaction: Making and mitigating social comparisons to “Friends.” Sex Roles, 60, 642-655.