Anorexia Nervosa Research Paper

When I was fifteen years old I woke up in a hospital room, attached to multiple IVs pumping fluid into my veins. My blood sugar levels were dangerously low and I hadn’t eaten in over twenty-four hours. The doctors diagnosed me with anorexia nervosa. For months, I had been trying to fit myself into a category that I was not. My friends were all stick thin and all of the celebrities I saw on television were tall and skinny, essentially perfect. When I looked at myself in the mirror, I saw everything that was wrong with myself. I thought I was overweight, ugly, and I looked nothing like the women I so desired to. I already worked out six days a week because I played three seasons of sports in high school. I thought that working out clearly wasn’t …show more content…
According to a study done by Daniel Clay, Vivian L. Vignoles, and Helga Dittmar for the Journal of Research on Adolescence, girls aged twelve to eighteen; the ideal woman was five feet seven inches tall, one hundred pounds, and a size five. This would constitute a BMI of 15.61 (Clay 453). The normal BMI for girls with the height of five feet seven inches is between 18.5 and 24.9. The BMI for what girls consider ideal is actually extremely underweight and falls into the category for anorexia. What does this say about our society as a whole if our ideal image for beauty is someone who is starving herself? This study actually found, in a content analysis of sit-coms on television within the past three years, seventy-six percent of female characters in popular television shows are below the average weight in America (Clay 452). Forty-seven percent of girls in 5th through 12th grade reported wanting to lose weight because of women they saw in the media (ANAD citing Levine). The fact that forty-seven percent of girls just in this one category want to have a body held by only five percent of the whole world’s population is a huge