Eating Disorders

Introduction

Disordered eating (DE) refers to a wide spectrum of maladaptive behaviors and attitudes about weight, body image, and food. At one end, it may be an unintentional caloric restriction, with fewer calories consumed than required for daily expenditure, thus leading to mild weight loss, slight hormonal disturbances, and a decline in sports performance. At the other end, DE may involve extreme body image delusion and life-threatening behaviors that meet the criteria for psychological diagnosis of an eating disorder such as anorexia nervosa or bulimia nervosa.

Large numbers of women around the world manifest emotional distress in a variety of disordered eating patterns. For years, eating disorders associated with body image dissatisfaction were confined primarily to Western, developed countries. Evidence from around the world indicates that this is no longer the case. The globalization of Western ideals of beauty, which glorify thinness, has begun to have a profound effect on women everywhere. For example, work by Anne Becker and her colleagues documented the impact television, new to the Fiji islands, had on adolescent girls. This work, which was publicized extensively in the Western media, demonstrated that within three years of access to television, disordered eating and a preoccupation with dieting, virtually unheard of in Fiji prior to the introduction of television, had emerged among a substantial percentage of the young women studied.

Many subsequent investigations of this same issue have indicated that access to Western ideals of beauty quickly counteract traditional aesthetic values, which have tended to embrace a more curvaceous and plump woman's body as the ideal (Waller, pp. 366). In many cultures, especially within those where food is often scarce, women of larger size have traditionally been seen as especially beautiful and desirable because their higher weight is presumed to indicate greater health, wealth, sexual pleasure, and the ability to produce viable children. While differences regarding feminine beauty persist, women in the higher socioeconomic classes who live in urban areas with the greatest access to Western ideals of beauty through magazines, films, television, Internet, and beauty pageants, demonstrate the most significant changes in the concept of beauty. With these changes comes the desire to perfect the body through dieting, self-induced vomiting and excessive exercise, the hallmarks of disordered eating and distorted body image.

Eating disorders demand high levels of treatment and health care arrangements. These are aimed at treating the patient and preventing complaints in the future. Anorexia nervosa and bulimia both can be treated with outpatient care services. However as complications increase, the risk of hospitalization also enhances. The National Institute for Health and Clinical Excellence (N.I.C.E) recommends that initially these patients should be served outpatient care and treatments. Inpatient care should only cater to those who have high levels of risks and have developed other psychological problems along with these. Specialized care services are crucial in treating eating disorders. However it has been observed that it is generally not available. A question arises as to what extent the inpatient health care services should be extended. It can either be given ...