There are many reasons why people feel they have to stop eating. There can be physiological and physical reasons for it. It could be something as trivial as the media showing models and celebrities that are skinny. People look at them and think it is normal to look that way and decide they want to resemble them and then take drastic measures such as my examples above to be like that. There are always diet magazines and different types of diets on how to lose weight quickly being advertised and healthy eating programmes on television that younger children are exposed to. They may try becoming healthier but in doing so this results in them not eating properly and the problem begins, not always intentionally. Some people just look at themselves and all they see is fat, even if there is nothing there they still feel they need to get rid of it. Other reasons are people don’t want to grow up; they don’t want to have to leave home and become part of a relationship where they are emotionally involved; they don’t want to earn their own money and have children, it can even be related to something more sinister such as being abused. It is a way of having control over some part of your life.
Even though the person makes themselves feel better by not eating and making themselves sick, this is done at great risk to their body, in the most serious of cases it can end in death. The body can begin to shut down where all of the organs start to fail. The victims hair becomes thin and brittle, their teeth start to decay, they bruise easily even if they are only knocked slightly, their lips and skin become very dry and chapped, they are constantly cold as they have no extra skin or fat stores to keep them warm, their immune system becomes very weak and they can catch viruses easily which could kill them as they are not strong enough to fight them, their bones become thin leading to osteoporosis in later life. The exterior of the body, as well as the interior, starts to break down.
There are many ways in which this disease could be seen as selfish and these include the person deliberately making themselves ill so they get some attention. Some people think that the victim is just starving themselves so they can be thin and so they can get what they see to be the perfect body, they think it’s about vanity. Another reason is that the person who suffers from anorexia is seen as selfish because it seems as if they do not think about the people around them, that love and care for them. It also looks like they just push them away and don’t think about how they feel.
Although some people think anorexics are selfish and start the illness themselves there are people who understand how they feel and that they aren’t as they seem because they can’t control the way they are. If you think about that individual, about how hard it must be to always be able to control what you do and how you feel. Imagine pushing all your family and friends away, being lonely, but not being able to get them back, not being able to explain why you do what you do. It must be hard, don’t you think? They don’t want the attention, they don’t want to be that skinny and of course they know that this disease could eventually kill them but they just can’t stop. They do go to treatment places where they can get better but it is a long and difficult road and a selfish person would not go through something like that unless they knew they were going to get better and wanted to regain all their friends and family’s love.
If you think about how other people think, you can see how people who suffer from anorexia aren’t selfish and that something has to happen for them to stop eating, it isn’t started on purpose. So now what do you think? IS it started purposely and are the people selfish? I would say no, but would you?
