It seems like every little girl dreams of becoming a model. They want to be thin and pretty like the models they see on television and in magazines. Often the desire becomes an obsession and young girls see "thinness" as being a needed characteristic. For many girls, the teenage years are spent trying to acquire this look. Females are trying diets and are exercising like it is a competition to see who can lose the most weight the quickest. The obsession of many young girls over their appearance or weight has led to a growing number of people who have developed an eating disorder to try to deal with their lack of self-esteem or other related problems. .
Food disorders throughout recorded history and even before mankind has suffered from a variety of illnesses and ailments. Whether it be from viruses, bacterium, or from the person himself, diseases and other disorders continue to take their toll, both physically and mentally. Among these disorders, one might find it unusual to find that even the very act of eating can sometimes be harmful to oneself. Compulsive overeating, anorexia nervosa, and bulimia nervosa are disorders that do not receive much of the media spotlight: nevertheless, these are serious enough to warrant medical care, since if left untreated, the patients succumb to the disorder or to one of many related side effects. These eating disorders combined affect about five million people in the United States alone, and of that number, about one percent of men and five percent of adolescent and adult women have anorexia nervosa or bulimia nervosa. What is even more compelling is that fifteen percent of young women have unhealthy or disordered eating patterns that, in time, could lead to severe health problems. As if these statistics were not sobering enough, about one thousand women die from anorexia nervosa each year (http://www.mirror-miror.org/symptoms.htm).
Research has proven that there is no single group of people afflicted with these disorders.