Many teen girls suffer with anorexia nervosa, an eating disorder in which girls use starvation diets to try to lose weight. They starve themselves down to skeletal thinness yet still think that they are overweight. Bulimia, meanwhile, is a disorder in which young women binge on food and then force themselves to vomit. They also often use laxatives to get food out of their system. All of these young women who suffer from this problem are considered to suffer from a psychiatric disorder. While the causes are debatable, one thing that is clear is that these young women have a distorted body image. (Wolf, pp.214-216) What is extremely alarming is that the current thin ideal for women in Western society, which is unattainable for all but a very small percentage of the population, is compounding this problem.

Thus, one of the most serious problems is that female nature is not what society says it should be. Some researchers theorize that anorexia is a young woman's way of canceling puberty. Since they lack body fat, anorexics don't get their periods and often lose their sexual characteristics such as public hair. They remain, in other words, little girls. There is also the complex issue of women feeling that by having an eating disorder they are finally in control of something in their life. This may sound strange, but much research has shown that women who have been abused or neglected in their childhoods develop these problems of control. (Attie and Brooks-Gun, pp.70-71).

Studies suggest that eating disorders often begin in early to mid-adolescence. They are directly connected to pubertal maturation and the increases in body fat that occurs during this phase. These biological changes are associated with increased dieting and unhealthy behaviours in early adolescence. This problem is aggravated by various problems, including negative body image, which has a close association with weight, perfectionism and depression.

Together with pubertal causes, there has also been evidence suggesting that dating is an ingredient to this phenomenon. Psychologists Elizabeth Cauffman and Laurence Steinberg examined 89 12-13 year old girls and examined their dating and other heterosexual activities in relation to their dieting behaviours and attitudes. The two researchers found that girls who were more involved in mixed-sex social activities and dating boys were more likely to exhibit disordered eating tendencies. (Cauffman and Steinberg.) The authors made the intriguing finding that sexual activity is correlated with more symptoms of disordered eating. This is especially interesting in as much as adults with eating disorders tend to be less sexually active. It thus appears that physical involvement in early adolescence leads to increased concern about appearance and attractiveness, but that when this concern becomes so great that it leads to disordered eating, the end result is often a decrease of the activities that contributed to the disorder in the first place. (Cauffman and Steinberg, p.634)

Longitudinal Study," Developmental Psychology, 1989, vol. 25, no.1, 7O-79.

Attie's and Brooks-Gun's study did, of course, have its limitations. The authors themselves admitted that their investigation focused only on a sample of white girls from upper-middle-class families. Yet most evidence has suggested that bulimia nervosa is more prevalent in middle-and-upper middle class white girls, although there is evidence suggesting that eating disorders are increasing in other ethnic and social class groups, especially for girls who experience more pressure to acculturate to white, middle-class standards. (Graber, Brooks-Gun, Paikoff and Warren, p.823)

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