Inspiration to thinspiration?

TYLER HAYWARD / SENIOR PHOTO EDITOR

Cassandra Jeffery 

Assistant InsideOut Editor

According to the Slimband dieting center, the average 20-year-old woman weighing in at 120 pounds and reaching a height of five foot, two inches should consume a total of 1776 calories per day. Not 1880 or 1978, but exactly 1776; one calorie over and the wrath of Jenny Craig will become more stressful then a biology midterm.

If you’re looking to be under the 120-pound mark, then try cutting down your calorie intake to 1421 per day. Slimband then goes one step further, suggesting 1065 calories per day for extreme results. After all, extreme measures lead to extreme results.

Our society is overly obsessed with calorie counting, to the point that we analyze every bit of food being consumed. Let’s say you eat the 120 calories in a large apple, a 300-calorie slice of pizza, and the 150 calories in a beer; six beers later and you’re over the calorie count for the day.

Next time, you’ll just have to avoid eating when preparing to drink. Often, an obsession with food, body weight, and dieting can lead to extremely dangerous illnesses, such as various sectors of eating disorders.

The pain and health complications affiliated with eating disorders are an inevitable result, yet time and time again individuals let their unrealistic goals of body perfection compromise their health.

Does beauty truly mean pain? Just a year ago, Rory Dakins, third-year Commerce student, would agree with such a statement. For four years, Dakins fell victim to bulimia nervosa.

“I wanted to be thinner, but I didn’t have the self control in order to restrict myself from eating. So when I would eat, usually junk food, I would feel guilty. Gaining weight was just not an option, so I would panic and purge,” confesses Dakins.

Eating disorders are vicious cycles, often resulting in continuous relapse coupled with a negative relationship to food and body image. “It would go through stages of intensity. For example, on certain days I would throw up an apple. It’s really an addiction that was hard to defeat. I would be constantly thinking, ‘What’s worse, gaining weight or just purging my food?’” says Dakins.

An obsession with food and body image has detrimental effects to an individual’s health and self-esteem, though the severity of eating disorders are frequently undermined or altogether ignored.

According to the Mental Health Association, 70 percent of women and 35 percent of men are on a diet. Of women between 15 and 25, one to two per cent have anorexia and three to five per cent have bulimia. Ten to twenty per cent of those who develop eating disorders die from related complications – that’s a higher rate than any other mental illness.

The severity of eating disorders varies among individuals, and for the most part, detecting that someone has an eating disorder is difficult. However, eating disorders are prevalent in both genders and many cultures. The most obvious form of pressure that contributes to an eating disorder is the glamorized media portraying men as buff and women as too thin. Depression, self-esteem problems and identity issues are just some of the many contributing factors to eating disorders.

The Mental Health Association has categorized three of the most commonly known sectors of eating disorders: anorexia nervosa, bulimia nervosa and binge-eating. Symptoms for anorexia include refusal to maintain appropriate body weight, dietary and exercise extremes, and constant reference to the body as being over-weight, despite dramatic weight loss.

Anorexia is essentially the refusal of food to the body, whereas bulimia is the process of purging unwanted food from the body post-consumption. Symptoms of bulimia include “self-induced vomiting, abuse of laxatives and diet pills, and eating beyond the point of fullness,” according to the Association.

Binge-eating disorder is a constant flux between overeating and excessive dieting. Symptoms include periods of impulsive and continuous eating followed by sporadic dietary crashes.

The effects of eating disorders are extremely damaging to our health. Anorexia essentially starves your muscles, as well as the heart. The heart can slowly begin to deteriorate and eventually stop because of starvation. According to the website Eating Disorder, “bulimics frequently experience muscle cramps, heartburn, fatigue, bloody diarrhea, fainting episodes, dizziness, and abdominal pain.”

Rory Dakins eventually conquered her illness. Upon extensive research she realized the damaging health effects of bulimia were not a part of her ideal conception of thinness. Her fixation with body image did not improve overnight; healing took time and energy. Today, Dakins says that she has learned to accept her body and work towards realistic weight goals in a natural way.

Dakins’ experience will hopefully be a lesson for anyone struggling with an eating disorder. However, our superficial society gives us the perception that self-worth is reliant on an unrealistic notion of perfection. We need to stop aiming for an unattainable perfection and instead focus on altering society’s definition of what perfect entails; apathy should be reserved for the world of celebrity influence, not our bodies.