I had to do some English homework and I decided to take that topic, although it's kind of risky, because I know some sufferers and yeah... i thought I could put it up here...
I really don't know why I'm uploading this here but critics are welcome

Here the PDF version including two pictures of Alexandra86: [link]

corrected by a friend of mine, chris hamer.


Eating Disorders
There are currently three main health problems facing Austria at the moment: Obesity, Anorexia nervosa and Bulimia nervosa. Today’s article deals with the two problems, mainly those of people being underweight. What causes them? Is there really some kind of illness or is it just caused by the media to get some extra sales? Is there any hope for those who suffer from these conditions to ever be cured?

First of all there is the difference between Anorexia and Bulimia: Sufferers of Anorexia do not want to eat much, the second is more difficult to describe and deal with. People who get caught by Bulimia are thrown into a vicious circle. They are innocent and harder to spot than those who suffer from Anorexia. They often don’t look different to others, but one thing could reveal their secret: They eat nearly twice as you would expect them to yet they then disappear off to the toilet and come back with tears in their eyes. Why? They throw up everything they ate and lie to their body. They think that this is a better thing to do, their friends and family do not notice it as easily and they can argue that they did eat and therefore do not have an eating disorder. They simply shrug it off and argue that they have a good metabolism.

But why do people do such cruel things to their body? First of all most of them have nearly no self-esteem. They are never satisfied with their body as it is and imagine themselves being thinner and thinner to the point of extreme, until there’s just skin and bones left. Some of them have problems with their parents or with school or, most commonly, have problems with maturity. They are afraid of being free and think that they might not be loved in the future as much as they are now so they need something to grab attention for them. I should mention that we’re not talking about dumb or stupid people. It is worth noting that the people who are most affected by this are girls, and these are normally the kind of people that write straight A’s in class. This kind of extreme success leads to a search for new things that they could beat they see it as a challenge; in this case it’s all about loosing weight. The circle continues and it’s not just beating their own weight; many of their friends get into it (even if they don’t want to). Not necessarily due to peer pressure but they just see many of their friends getting thinner and thinner and therefore want to be like them. It is comparable to fashion. If one girl buy’s a new handbag and everyone else think’s it looks good many people will buy the same handbag to try and grab some of the shine that the most popular girl had by having it. It seems to a certain extent that popularity and social standing is the key to all this.

Even if there’s really nothing attractive about their bodies to anyone else they continue with their trend and try to lose more and more weight. A BMI of 14 and less seems to be the new 20 for them. BMI? The Body Mass Index which tries to give an all-over result, it is calculated with the formula (weight in kilograms/(body size in m)² and the results should be between 10 and 30 while results around 20-22 are defined as normal by the health authorities. Some of them see the truth and begin to see that it is cruel what they’ve done to their bodies. Yet once they have got that far it’s not that easy for them to get back to living normally. On the one hand sufferers of Bulimia have trained some kind of reflex that lets them throw up every time they think they have eaten too much, or at all for that matter, on the other hand some people have gotten so far that their bodies have started “eating themselves from the inside” by destroying muscle calcium is also removed from the bones and so on. By this point it can only be describe as a serious addiction. Like smoking it becomes so second nature to these people that they cannot do anything else.

Something seriously has to be done about this. Many girls are extremely close to such severe malnourishment that they are seriously risking death by continuing not to eat. Their bodies are not getting enough nourishment, as it is, so by eating just a little less they could die.
Many doctors are speaking out against anorexia and bulimia yet it still is not getting enough publicity. Some girls suffering from these conditions have acted as models for campaigns to try and deter other people from starting in the first place or to give people a reason to find help; it is a good start yet a lot more needs to be done to really fix this problem.