"Our aim of NEDAwareness Week is to ultimately prevent eating disorders and body image issues while reducing the stigma surrounding eating disorders and improving access to treatment. Eating disorders are serious, life-threatening illnesses — not choices — and it’s important to recognize the pressures, attitudes and behaviors that shape the disorder."
Eating Disorders Awareness Week starts today. Here are a few links to help get you motivated, involved, and aware!
EATING DISORDERS INCREASING IN MEN, CHILDREN, AND ELDERLY
wcsh6.com
At time eating disorders were considered primarily as a women's disease. But recent studies show a growing number of men, young children and the elderly are suffering from anorexia or bulimia.
Eating disorder experts here in Maine say more people are getting help thanks to heightened awareness about the disorders.
Aleah Starr is a 19 year old sophomore at Colby College. She hopes to one day teach middle school English. At one time in her life, she suffered from anorexia, but her parents spotted the signs early on.
"They were able to get me help and I was very fortunate to have help when I needed, where I needed it, very rapidly," said Starr.
But the face of the disease is changing. The New England Eating Disorder program at Mercy Hospital is the state's only comprehensive eating disorders clinic. The clinic used to primarily treat women 14 to 22 years of age, now they have patients as young as 7 and as old as 70 -- and more men are seeking help.
Sunday afternoons were reserved for "Maw Maw's" dining room table in Ashley Matthews' household.
The junior photography major's childhood was documented by these large weekly gatherings of extended family, which included her cousin of the same age.
But in the latter years of high school, Matthews noticed a change around the table. Her cousin would no longer eat in front of the family.
When obsessive exercise and minimal eating made her cousin's struggle with an eating disorder obvious, Matthews said she was still in disbelief.
"My aunts and uncles were telling me, 'Ashley, you need to talk to her; you need to talk to her' because I was close to her," she said. "I was in complete denial because I thought she didn't have the willpower to do something that dramatic to her body."
The number of anorexic girls who end up in hospital has risen by 80% over the past decade.
The new figures showed that children as young as nine are being rushed to hospital after becoming seriously ill by starving themselves almost to death.
Susan Ringwood, chief executive of the UK eating disorder charity, beat, said the rise in admissions could be due to delayed treatment for anorexia.
She said: ‘We can’t tell if there’s more people actually suffering from an eating disorder or whether it’s just that more are getting admitted to hospital.’
WOMEN'S CENTERS SHOWCASES SIGNS, SYMPTOMS OF EATING DISORDERS
Murray State News
Susan Lawhead said she hopes when students walk through the Women’s Center’s “Room With a View,” they realize they could walk through the room of their sister, roommate, family member or friend. And if not, the junior from Glen Carbon, Ill., said she hopes the project raises awareness on the warning signs attributed with eating disorders.
Jane Etheridge, director of the Women’s Center, said “Room With a View” gives viewers the opportunity to walk into the life of a woman with an eating disorder.
The exhibit is from 6:30 to 9 p.m. Sunday through Wednesday in Old Clark College. Five unoccupied bedrooms are decorated to describe a female student’s first year as a Murray State student with an eating disorder.
“There are journals, pictures, decorations, mirrors, everything that would be a part of this girl’s life,” Etheridge said. “The first room is in September and the following months are similar, but you can see the transitions she is taking.”
The exhibit ends in with the month of May, right before the student leaves school for the summer. Without giving any secrets away, Etheridge said the fourth is the darkest, with light at the end of the tunnel in May.
The final room features display boards with information and other resources on eating disorders. “There will be some information on prevention, others on the media’s effect, advice on how to eat healthy, body image issues and so on,” Etheridge said.
Monday night, clinical psychology graduate students are available to evaluate attendees’ attitudes toward eating and their body.
"The grad students will be able to determine if they have a healthy body image or view of themselves,” Etheridge said. “It is called the Eating Attitudes Test 26. It takes about 10 minutes and the grad students will give people their results and advice if they think they need it.”
Both Susan Lawhead and Etheridge agree the purpose of “Room With a View” is to raise awareness about eating disorders as more than just dieting.
“We want to develop a greater sensitivity and understanding of the vast complexity of eating disorders,” Etheridge said. “The woman portrayed is striving to be thin, but there are a lot of other things going on in her life that are challenging and stressful.”
On the catwalks of New York Fashion Week, "skinny" is still beautiful. But, a million miles away in Ashkelon, in southern Israel, a competition to find new Israeli models is trying to change all that.
"They want to be pretty, she wants to be good looking, and how can I be good looking? I have to be skinny, skinny, and skinny and skinny," says fashion photographer Adi Barkan.
For the past seven years, fashion photographer Adi Barkan has been battling the fashion industry's obsession with super- skinny models. He wants the world's designers and advertisers to use bigger, healthier girls.
Successful girls here will have to have a body mass index more than 19.5 - many of today's stars are only 14 or 15.
It was at competitions like this one that Adi Barkan first understood the enormous pressures young girls were under to lose weight - anyone he sees today that's too thin will be told to go home and put on weight.
Adi has seen the tragic consequences of this obsession with weight loss - Hilla Elmalich - a friend and model, for years fought a desperate battle against anorexia. Two years ago, she died. It only made Adi more determined.
MORE than one million people in the UK are victims of an eating disorder, with as many as one in 20 women having eating habits which are of concern.
Now campaigners are hoping to quash those statistics by raising the awareness of the condition during Eating Disorders Awareness Week, which starts on Monday.
A Warrington mum whose teenage daughter suffered from anorexia – she does not wish to be named – warned parents and friends to look out for the following tell-tale signs common in sufferers: - Becoming withdrawn - Fussy eating - Lack of communication or saying they have already eaten - Wearing baggy clothes - Disappearing to the bathroom or for walks immediately after eating to be sick in private l Isolating themselves from their peers and lunch time.
In 2006 the Liberal Democrats reported an increase in children under the age of 10 receiving hospital treatment for such conditions.
Figures revealed there were 58 children under 10 and 35 of those were boys.
With increased coverage of size zero models, the same year saw more girls aged 18 or younger being treated in hospitals – a statistic higher than any other year from the past decade.
A recent survey by National Health Services (NHS) revealed the number of young girls hospitalized with an eating disordercalled anorexia has nearly doubled in a decade.
Anorexia is aneating disorder characterized by unrealistic fear of weight gain, self-starvation, and conspicuous distortion of body image.
According to the latest official figures, the number of girls aged 16 and underadmitted to hospital due to anorexia has increased sharply, jumping by 80 percent over the past 10 years.
More precisely, the number of admissions among girls aged 16 and under jumped from 256 in 1996/97 to 462 in 2006/07 in last ten years.
The latest NHS figures show girls aged 15 were admitted 141 times to hospitals in England in 2006/07 compared to just 75 admissions in 1996/97. The same was true among 16-year-olds, jumping from 55 admissions in 1996/97 to 108 in 2006/07.
Shockingly, there were 93 admissions in 2006/07 among 14-year-olds as compared to 58 admissions in 1996/97.
Similarly, among 13-year-old girls, there was a 38 percent rise, from 34 admissions to 47, while among 12-year-old girls there was a 207 percent rise, from 13 admissions to 40.
The number of young girls being admitted to hospital suffering from anorexia has jumped by 80% in the last decade, according to the Liberal Democrats.
Figures revealed in a parliamentary answer show that the number of admissions had risen from 256 in 1996/97 to 462 in 2006/7.
MP Mark Hunter (Lib Dem, Cheadle) said: ‘These shocking figures show just how little the government has done to tackle the problem of eating disorders like anorexia.
I've finally come to realize that I've wasted far too much time trying to achieve society's notion of the perfect female form and that who you are can never be defined by the reflection found in your mirror.
I fell for the dangerous Kimkins diet scam which brought me alarmingly close to anorexia and opened my eyes to eating disorders.
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