1. Focus On: Enhancing Your Body Image

2. What Is Body Image? Body Image
How you see yourself in your mind
What you believe about your own appearance (including your real perceptions about your body)
How comfortable you feel about your body, including your height, shape, and weight
A Negative Body Image is either a distorted perception of your shape or feelings of discomfort, shame, or anxiety about your body.
A Positive Body Image is true perception of your appearance; a celebration of being unique.
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3. Many Factors Influence Body Image
What Is Body Image?
Many Factors Influence Body Image
The media and popular culture
More than 68% of Americans are overweight or obese; a significant disconnect exists between the media's idealized images and the typical American body.
Family, community, and cultural groups
Parents can enhance or disrupt children's self body image.
Physiological and psychological factors
Distorted body image may be linked to the brain's ability to regulate neurotransmitters.
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4. Body Image Continuum
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5. How Can I Build a More Positive Body Image?
Challenge the commonly held attitudes in contemporary society.
The Four Myths
How you look is more important than who you are.
Anyone can be slender and attractive if they have willpower.
Extreme dieting is an effective weight-loss strategy.
Appearance is more important than health.
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6. Body Dysmorphic Disorder (BDD)
Body Image Disorders
Body Dysmorphic Disorder (BDD)
Persons with BDD are obsessively concerned with their appearance, have a distorted view of their own body shape, body size, weight, perceived lack of muscles, facial blemishes, size of body parts, and so on.
Social Physique Anxiety (SPA)
Persons with SPA spend a disproportionate amount of time fixating on their bodies, working out and performing tasks that are ego centered and self-directed.
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7. Some People Develop Eating Disorders
Disordered Eating
Some People Develop Eating Disorders
Disordered eating—a pattern of atypical behaviors used to achieve or maintain a lower body weight
Eating disorder—A psychiatric disorder characterized by severe disturbances in body image and eating behaviors
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8. What Is Disordered Eating?
In the United States, about 24 million people of all ages meet the established criteria.
Most common among those in their teens and twenties, although children as young as 6 have been diagnosed.
In 2010, 1.7% of college students reported that they were dealing with either anorexia or bulimia.
Common among athletes, affecting up to 62% of college athletes
Male sufferers are increasing, currently representing up to 25% of anorexia and bulimia patients and almost 40% of binge eaters.
Many people with disordered eating are clinically depressed, have obsessive-compulsive disorder or other psychiatric problems.
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9. Eating Issues Continuum
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10. Severe, life-threatening weight loss Intense fear of fat
Anorexia Nervosa
Self-starvation
Severe, life-threatening weight loss
Intense fear of fat
Extremely distorted body image
Causes are complex and variable.
It is estimated that 0.3% of females meet the criteria for anorexia nervosa.
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11. Anorexia Nervosa (cont.)
The APA criteria for anorexia nervosa are
Refusal to maintain body weight at or above a minimally normal weight range for age and height
Intense fear of gaining weight or becoming fat, even though considered underweight by all medical criteria
Disturbance in the way in which one's body weight or shape is experienced, undue influence of body weight or shape on self-evaluation, or denial of the seriousness of the current low body weight
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12. What Anorexia Can Do to the Body
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13. Bulimia Nervosa
Individuals binge on huge amounts of food and then engage in purging, vomiting, or taking laxatives, or exercising excessively to lose consumed calories.
Bulimics may fall within normal weight range or they may be overweight.
Up to 3% of adolescents and young women are bulimic; rates for men are about 10% of female rates.
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14. What Bulimia Can Do to the Body
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15. Bulimia Nervosa (cont.)
The APA criteria for bulimia nervosa are
Recurrent episodes of binge eating
Recurrent inappropriate compensatory behavior to prevent weight gain
Binge eating and inappropriate compensatory behaviors occur on average at least once a week for 3 months.
Body shape and weight unduly influence self-evaluation.
The disturbance does not occur exclusively during episodes of anorexia nervosa.
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16. Binge-Eating Disorder
Binge eaters gorge but do not practice inappropriate compensatory behaviors and so may be clinically obese.
Lifetime prevalence of binge eating is 1.6%.
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17. Binge-Eating Disorder
The APA criteria for binge-eating disorder are
Recurrent episodes of binge eating
The binge eating episodes are associated with 3 or more of the following:
Eating much more rapidly than normal
Eating until feeling uncomfortably full
Eating large amounts of food when not hungry
Eating alone due to embarrassment over quantity eaten
Feeling disgusted with oneself, depressed, or very guilty after overeating
Marked distress regarding binge eating is present.
The binge eating occurs, on average, at least once a week for 3 months.
The binge eating is not associated with compensatory behavior.
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18. What Is Disordered Eating?
Some Eating Disorders Are Not Easily Classified
Some patterns of eating disorder do not fit into diagnostic criteria but are a legitimate psychiatric illness.
This group of disorders, Eating Disorders Not Otherwise Specified, can include night eating syndrome, or recurrent purging in the absence of binge eating.
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19. ABC News Video: Extreme Healthy Eating
Discussion Questions
What is orthorexia? What kinds of food does a person with orthorexia eat?
Why can eating "too much healthy" food be a bad thing?
What are the five warning signs of orthorexia?
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20. Treatment for Eating Disorders
Without treatment, about 20% of people with a serious eating disorder will die from it.
With treatment, long-term recovery rates range from 44–76%.
Treatment focuses on reducing threat to life and long-term therapy on the psychological, social, environmental, and physiological factors that have led to the problem.
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21. How Can You Help? Learn as much as you can about the disorder.
Know the difference between facts and myths.
Be honest.
Be caring, but firm.
Compliment your friend's personality, successes, or accomplishments.
Be a good role model.
Tell someone.
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22. Exercise Disorders Some People Develop Exercise Disorders
Compulsive exercise is also called anorexia athletica.
Characterized not by a desire to exercise but a compulsion to do so
A person may struggle with guilt and anxiety if they don't work out.
Injuries to joints, tendons, ligaments, cartilage, broken bones, and stress on the heart
Often plagued by anxiety and/or depression
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23. Muscle Dysmorphia
A relatively new form of body image disturbance and exercise disorder among men that occurs when a man believes that his body is insufficiently lean or muscular
Behaviors include comparing oneself unfavorably to others, frequently checking one's appearance in the mirror, and camouflaging one's appearance.
Individuals with muscle dysmorphia are likely to use anabolic steroids and dietary supplements.
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24. The Female Athlete Triad
The Female Athlete Triad Involves Three Interrelated Disorders
Low energy intake,
typically prompted
by disordered eating
behaviors
Menstrual dysfunction such as amenorrhea
Poor bone density
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