Sociological Imagination Of Anorexia Nervosa

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What is sociological imagination? From C.Wright Mills Sociological imagination is the realization that personal troubles are rooted from public issues. The distinction between personal and public issues is that a personal problem refers to problems that individuals blame on themselves due to own failings. While public issues are social problems that affect several individuals.
A topic that caught my attention because I can relate to it is body image and how it goes in hand with eating disorders. What is body image and eating disorders? Denotatively, body image is the subjective picture or mental image of one’s own body. An eating disorder is any range of psychological disorder characterized by abnormal or disturbed eating habits. Body image
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I believe that the exposure that individuals have to social media standards of beauty and physical perfection change and become increasingly unattainable. Media intensifies people to be displeased with their body image, which can resort to extreme measures such as eating disorders because people attempt to accomplish these unreachable goals. Unfortunately, at the age of fifteen I got diagnosed with Anorexia Nervosa. So what is Anorexia Nervosa? Anorexia Nervosa is an eating disorder in which a person has intense fear of gaining weight. Individuals limit the amount of food consumed which can become a serious health threat. At fourteen, I was 5’3” weighing one hundred and twenty five pounds which is a healthy weight for a girl my age, considering as well that I was going through puberty. It all began with the comments and teasing here and there at school by my peers about my weight and the way I looked. Few of the comments that I got told were “you’re too fat” or “you have chubby cheeks” which seems like innocent teasing but affected me a lot. Then their teasing turned into an everyday occurrence which eventually started to …show more content…
However, it’s not only an individual’s personal problems that play a role in developing this distorted obsession of body image which leads to eating disorders but also public problems like social media. Tiggerman (2002) claimed that “the media puts severe pressure on women of all ages to be a certain size. Repeated exposure to such images may lead a woman to internalize the thin ideal such that it becomes accepted by them as the reference point against which to judge themselves” (92). Even though, it’s hard not to be influenced by media, it’s not only to be blamed for setting the standards of beauty because it constantly portrayed in every outlet possible. An article from Brown University explains that, “People with negative body image tend to feel that their size or shape is a sign of personal failure too and that it is a very important indicator of worth”. Its definitely astonishing to realize that media through the years has gradually created cultural standards for body image which has caused great pressure and stress in women’s lives to meet these unrealistic principles of

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