During the 1800s the Rubenesque woman was part of the ideal female body image. Until the early 1900's, for a woman to have extra weight on her body and look voluptuous was a sign of good health and wealth.

In the early 1900's, our culture saw a shift from this plump, voluptuous female form to a thinner frame with less curves. The new female ideal of the 1920's was the thin, short haired flapper.

People started dieting and sports became popular pastimes as exercise began to be viewed as a healthy activity to enhance the body.

Many teens don't realize the psychological or physical dangers behind reed-like bodies. Instead they uphold super-thin images as their ideal. "The media has a tremendous influence--impacting on girls to be thin," says Elaine Yudkovitz, a New York psychotherapist and specialist in eating disorders. The statistics are alarming: About one in 100 adolescent girls suffers from anorexia. The results can be deadly. Roughly 10 percent of anorexics die of medical complications from lack of food, or from suicide.

For years researchers have tied eating disorders to severe psychological problems. Now scientists have found a new link in the equation: brain chemistry.

have deficient amounts of serotonin, a brain chemical associated with moods and emotions, circulating in their brains.

The ideal body shape for women has become increasingly thinner over recent decades

Caucasian females exhibit more body image disturbance than other ethnic groups

However, other studies have found either no ethnic differences in body image disturbance (Cachelin, Striegel-Moore, & Elder, 1998), or that these minority groups actually reported greater body dissatisfaction compared to their Caucasian peers (Robinson et al., 1996).

The findings indicated that Asian American women and men were lighter, shorter, and smaller than Caucasian American women and men. Regardless of these differences, all groups evidenced similar levels of dissatisfaction with physical features related to body size, though women wanted to be smaller and men wanted to be either larger or smaller

r height and their eyes than were Caucasian Americans.

affect millions of individuals worldwide

While they have been more typically attributed to middle class, Caucasian, adolescent females, current research suggests that there is a similar prevalence of eating disorders and their symptoms, especially body dissatisfaction, among Asian American girls and women.

The media may be a significant influence on eating disorders through its impact on values, norms, and image standards accepted by modern society

Both society’s exposure to media and eating disorders have grown immensely over the past decade.

Hollywood displays an unrealistic standard of beauty

Dieting creates many dynamics that encourage eating disorders

dieting is considered "normal" and is encouraged in western culture. In fact, when someone attempts to lose weight through dieting and does not, she often considers herself a failure.

Those who diet moderately are five times more likely to develop eating disorders than those who don't diet. For those who diet "severely," the chances of an eating disorder are eighteen times greater.

out of 10 women will be dissatisfied with their reflection, and more than half may see a distorted image.

Why are women so much more self-critical than men? Because women are judged on their appearance more than men, and standards of female beauty are considerably higher and more inflexible.

It has been estimated that young women now see more images of outstandingly beautiful women in one day than our mothers saw throughout their entire adolescence.

Anorexia nervosa is a psychiatric diagnosis that describes an eating disorder characterized by low body weight and body image distortion with an obsessive fear of gaining weight. Individuals with anorexia are known to commonly control body weight through the means of voluntary starvation, purging, vomiting, excessive exercise, or other weight control measures, such as diet pills or diuretic drugs. It primarily affects adolescent females, however approximately 10% of people with the diagnosis are male. Anorexia nervosa is a complex condition, involving psychological, neurobiological, and sociological components.

promotion of thinness as the ideal female form in Western industrialised nations, particularly through the media.

Although anorexia nervosa is usually associated with Western cultures, exposure to Western media is thought to have led to an increase in cases in non-Western countries.

fear of death was lessened in people who had a sense of purpose. Sense of purpose is more of a spiritual principle than a religious activity. They found that sense of purpose had a positive effect on subjective well-being, alleviating fear of death and the anxiety that results