We do have to distinguish between an eating disorder and a drive to keep "fit" for the sake of say a fashion/modeling career or an acting career. Men and women both are compelled to lauch into periods of diets and exercise to lose unwanted body fat and, for the men, to bulk up for, say, an upcoming film role or, like the rest of us "not-so-gamorous" types, just to catch up from month or years of neglect.
And yes, this can reach some less-than-desireable extremes, especially with women.
But anorexia and bulimia are in a whole different category, where the drive to "look good" becomes lost in a compulsion that becomes out of control and leads to the stuff we are discussing here -- an anorexic or bilimic person does not look so good because of the wasting effect the condition has caused.
I think that many people (the great majority of whom are women) with these conditions realize at some point that they are suffering from something abnormal, unhealthy and unattractive, but for the majority this goes back to adolescence, where a psychological "trigger" or triggers often have driven them to desperately resort to what became in time out of control, and they feel powerless to stop the behavior -- it's a deeply engrained habit.
I have a lady friend who I've known for some years and she has strugged with an eating disorder since her early teens -- her mother said some "things" while not meaning to be unkind, triggered the adolescent psyche into flight, and the problem followed her -- she is in her thirties, and has fought with this all this time, sometimes with brief periods of success, but like any such addictive behavior she has tended to relapse. She gets incrementally "better", and yet she still struggles to keep her weight up to and over 110 lbs. And believe me, she has no illusions of "glamor" with this -- she doesn't care about the fashion industry she just battles with her personal demons.
So, I'm just suggesting a balance here. Yeah, the fashion industry and the acting industry may drive some people into that condition, but in reality most sufferers go back to their teens and typically earlier teens where they are not emotionally equipped to deal with things in a "mature" way.
Of course, one can go into extremes without actually having one of these conditions, and things like crash dieting can be seriously unhealthy, as well as produce the "anorexic look", and in that sense, yes, pressure from a modeling career or an acting career are certainly factors, because these ladies need to keep themselves from gaining weight -- that's the facts of life in those industries, but we hope that they don't go that far, 'cause hey, most of us guys like a bit of meat on those bones
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