Our society tells women especially that to be thin is to be beautiful, powerful and sexually attractive. Pencil-thin, surgically enhanced supermodels have goddess status and fat people are the last socially acceptable target of mockery and prejudice. Eating disorders are not about food and slimness. They are about self-worth and sense of power or personal effectiveness in the world. Food becomes a metaphor, a substitute for all the things we cannot control.
Food actually plays a rather small role in the development of eating disorders.
The body and food, however, end up being the battleground. Anorexia Nervosa is the refusal to maintain body weight at or above a minimally normal weight for age and height. There is an intense fear of gaining weight or becoming fat, even though they may be underweight. For those anorectics continuing into adulthood, there is infertility, osteoporosis, lack of sex drive, exhaustion, frequent illness due to immune suppression, and a list of associated psychiatric disorders from depression to obsessive compulsive disorder. Bulimia Nervosa is characterized as recurrent episodes of binge and purge habits associated with lack of control over eating during these episodes.