Bulimia and Society

In the past 20 years, our society has been focusing mainly on women's beauty and weight. The great emphasis upon the importance and attractiveness of a slim, svelte figure is presented daily through the media and its various industries. Hence, today we have a growing number of girls who have become obsessed with weight, exercise, and dieting. For some, the compulsiveness shows through bulimia. Bulimia nervosa has become in recent years a major problem among young women and has been described as an "epidemic" affecting as many as 13% of the women on some college campuses. Bulimia, therefore, is caused mainly by society’s obsession with thinness, which is stressed on even more by the media, and as a result ends up harming women physically and mentally.

Bulimia's literal translation is "ox hunger”. Today we use bulimia to refer to
a habitual eating of large amounts of food (bingeing), followed by purging (usually
vomiting), and often alternated with periods of self-imposed...