Eating Disorders

Large numbers of women around the world manifest emotional distress in a variety of disordered eating patterns. For years, eating disorders associated with body image dissatisfaction were confined primarily to Western, developed countries. Evidence from around the world indicates that this is no longer the case. The globalization of Western ideals of beauty, which glorify thinness, has begun to have a profound affect on women everywhere. For example, work by Anne Becker and her colleagues documented the impact television, new to the Fiji islands, had on adolescent girls. This work, which was publicized extensively in the Western media, demonstrated that within three years of access to television, disordered eating and a preoccupation with dieting, virtually unheard of in Fiji prior to the introduction of television, had emerged among a substantial percentage of the young women studied.

Many subsequent investigations of this same issue have indicated that access to Western ideals of beauty quickly counteract traditional aesthetic values, which have tended to embrace a more curvaceous and plump woman's body as the ideal. In many cultures, especially within those where food is often scarce, women of larger size have traditionally been seen as especially beautiful and desirable because their higher weight is presumed to indicate greater health, wealth, sexual pleasure, and the ability to produce viable children. While differences regarding feminine beauty persist, women in the higher socioeconomic classes who live in urban areas with the greatest access to Western ideals of beauty through magazines, films, television, Internet, and beauty pageants, demonstrate the most significant changes in the concept of beauty. With these changes comes the desire to perfect the body through dieting, self-induced vomiting and excessive exercise, the hallmarks of disordered eating and distorted body image.