Eating Disorders, Relationships, And Self-Esteem

1447 Words6 Pages

Imagine looking in the mirror and seeing the worst version of you everyday. Millions of people worldwide are subject to this while dealing the constant worry of food, weight, and image. Eating disorders have the ability to cause someone problems psychologically and physically, impacting their system as a whole. Due to the increasingly prominent presence of eating disorders in today’s image conscious society, a solution for prevention is needed more than ever. To find a solution we must examine how eating disorders, relationships, and self-esteem affect one another.
Relationships are the root of teaching values and life skills, whether these relationships are with the media, friends, or, most influentially, parents. Yet relationships can tend …show more content…

The social disruption involves the parents becoming isolated, having a strain on the parent’s marriage, and affecting the parents at their workplace. The family is also impacted by emotions such as feel frustration, guilt, worry, and anger directed towards the disorder. However, they need to learn to cope with these emotions by talking, through acceptance, by being informed, and by distancing themselves at times from the situation at hand (Svensson, Nilsson, Levi & Carballeira Suarez, …show more content…

Low self-esteem can alter someone’s percepetion of a relationship and result in problems due to misinterpretion. Therefore, people with low self-esteem may believe that someone could never love them and distance themselves to avoid condemning their self esteem (Sciangula & Morry, 2010).
We can also see breeding grounds for eating disorders through media, one of the biggest being social networking. Websites such as Facebook enforce the thin ideal by posting perfectly chosen and edited pictures that construct an unrealistic image leading to low self-esteem. Facebook produces fake relationships based on deceitful representation and causes low self-esteem if not given the proper admiration from these fake relationships (through ‘likes’ and the number of friends to your account) (Mabe, Forney, & Keel, 2014).
With the increase of media came the idea of social comparison theory, a theory that shows how people construct perceptions of themselves by comparing their image with social constructs in the media. Studies found that this led to body dissatisfaction and depression. This theory influences adolescents predominantly due to their newly changing bodies and emotional/social constructing. Predictably, adolescents are the population with the most eating disorders (Eyal & Te’eni-harari,