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PSY 240 - Week 4 assignment Essay

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Week 4 Assignment PSY 240 November 13, 2013 To Eat or Not to Eat Hello everyone. My name is Ruth and I want to talk to you guys about eating disorders. An eating disorder is essentially an illness that disrupts a person’s every day diet which can cause a person to pretty much stop eating or over eat, depending on the illness. These illnesses are more apparent in the teenage years and in to young adulthood (Pinel, 2011), which makes sense because this is when we start becoming more aware of our bodies as well as other people’s bodies. We might want to look like the model we just saw on TV and will do anything to get that body, right? But an eating disorder is not the way to go; we will get in to the effects of …show more content…

Being obsessed with weight, people with anorexia nervosa tend to weigh themselves repeatedly, portion food and eat very small quantities are certain foods – no fats, no carbs, no sugars (Pinel, 2011). Just like with drugs, some people get better after one bout of anorexia nervosa, while some relapse and some, unfortunately, lose the battle as their health declines. Now, here is some of the scarier stuff that happens to our bodies with anorexia nervosa. Your bones thin, which is called osteoporosis); your hair and nails become brittle; your skin becomes dry and yellow because your liver stops functioning correctly. A condition called lanugo starts which is when thin, fine hair starts to grow all over the body; you become anemic and your muscles become weak and start wasting away; you becoming severely constipated as well as develop multi-organ failure. You get low blood pressure as well as slow breathing and pulse; brain damage and damage to the structure and function of the heart occurs, including heart disease and heart attacks; your internal body temperature drops which causes you to be cold all of the time and you start to feel very lethargic and tired all of the time. Lastly, if your condition continues, you can become infertile but you need to be at a healthy weight to be able to carry a baby anyway. Do these symptoms sound fun to anyone? You group a couple of these together, and you could lose your life.

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