"Increase exposure to thin ideal bodies in magazines was related to increased eating disorder symptoms for adolescent girls.(Botta 2003) "Anorexia affects primarily people in their teens and twenties, but studies report it in children as young as six and individuals as old as seventy-six."(ANRED) As we see the severity of anorexia is spreading its way through out the country, because of the pressure put on women to look like something they cannot. Women have to feel insecure about their bodies after looking to media images, it consumes them. "Eating disorders do not occur in all culture at all times. An obsession with slimness-a core feature of eating disorders-in concentrated in cultures in which food is abundant. In cultures of scarcity, the ideal body shape is much more likely to be rotund, suggesting that ideals tend toward what is difficult to achieve."(Polury, Herman 2002) "Our society equates thinness with female beauty and holds severe negative views toward obese women."(Basow, Kobrynowicz 1993) Overweight women are forced to look at beautiful women everywhere they look, on every magazine cover or on every television show they watch, and in everyday like they are often left out of social groups because of their weight, often only finding friends in other obese people. "Bombarded with magazine covers, billboards, TV commercials and movies celebrating thinness and beauty may wreak havoc on the mind or a woman whose self-esteem is already low."(Browne 1993) Women who fall victim to anorexia become very moody, hyper, and constantly letting people know how they are overweight. Having dealt directly with this I have seen a loved one become infatuated with her look which wasn't even what she was trying to reach, she reached it and passed it and kept on going, eventually turning herself into nothing more than a pile of skin and bones. She quickly became obsessed with exercise, and eating the smallest portions imaginable.
