Anorexia nervosa is an eating disorder characterized by refusal to maintain a healthy body weight and obsessive fear of gaining weight due to a distorted self image, which may be maintained by various cognitive biases that alter how the affected individual evaluates and thinks about their body, food and eating. It is a condition that goes beyond dieting, and when women start starving themselves to slim down, it will leads to dramatic weight loss and this is certainly life threatening.



Society has been obsessed of diet control recently. The dream to have a super slim body is a major trend in our society today. This is influence by cultural factors, such as the promotion of thinness as the ideal female form, particularly through the media (Television and magazines) and now every woman probably want to have a super slim body. Most women start with exercising and Yoga which is a healthy positive habit, but then it goes to weight-loss diet and then start severe dieting which can lead to anorexia.



Anorexia and fashion industry  
  

Anorexia and fashion industry are closely related. The necessity of being super thin for model is what makes so many of them desperately and disgustingly thin to fits into the business. The fashion industry has long been blamed for contributing to the bulimia and anorexia prevalence among teenagers with its uses of very super slim models.



Fashion Designer Giorgio Armani has blamed stylists and the media for the fashion industry’s obsession with ultra-thin women. Armani said no girl needed to be anorexic to be fashionable. Western fashions and films have given today’s teenagers the idea that thin is beautiful. I agree to this but obsession to lose weight that reaches the stage of anorexia is not beautiful!



Designer Michael Kors says: I will no longer use models under the age of 16,and called the recent obsession with preteen girls a "huge problem" and said designers need to embrace "real women."


Aspiring models tries to become the so-called size-zero (size 0) or size 00 models and they stop eating.



Wait! Take a look at this photos:






Her hip bones jut out painfully, her ribs protrude, and her stick thin arms hang limply by the side. 


At her thinnest, in the grip of anorexia, 5 ft 11 inch former catwalk model Inga Radziejewski was size 00 and weight just seven pounds. Now a healthy size 12, after successful treatment, lnga was turned away from a modeling audition because she was “too fat”. She has since turned her back on the catwalk and is finding work in the mainstream fashion industry. 



She says: I was incredibly skinny but at fittings for designers like Christian Dior, the clothes were so small that even though I was anorexic, I still struggled to get in them despite my measurements being 27 in chest, 21 in waist and 27.5 in hips. At that time I never thought anything was wrong with me, but now I can see that I was dangerously underweight.

Another interesting story is that of Kim Noorda in the latest Vogue. 

Have a look at her superSkinny arms, her bonny chest, and her long thin neck.



At 110 pounds and 5’10, Noorda looked skinny and sick and luckily her agent call for intervention. She ended up at Renfrew center for eating disorder in New York city undergoing a treatment for anorexia and has since returned to healthier weight (125 lbs), but she faces constant pressure to lose weight and struggles to stay healthy. She can’t fit into sample sizes. At every fitting or show she attends, she meets far skinnier models and wonders if she'll be criticized or canceled; more often than not, she is greeted by silence where before, when she'd lost weight, she'd received praise.



She wrote: Not a single person has told me that I have gained weight since the start of the shows. Not during the castings, and not even my European agent has said anything. Everything fit. This confused me, because I thought people could see every gram. Then again, no one has said that I look good, either, or commented on my appearance otherwise. When I started looking at pictures from the first show, there were still some things I disliked. My legs and cheeks have become fatter. I really need to do something about that. Exercises. On the Internet there are no positive reactions to how I looked....



She further wrote: In New York I want to be enthusiastic about the shows, but I can't seem to: I keep being unsure about my weight. By the end of it I want to go home. Skip London. But my agents advise me to go there. Then I let go again and just do my best. Milan, surprisingly, is a lot of fun. The shows do not go great, and people definitely made me feel I was too big, but outside of that I have a really good time.



These stories are painful to read  – not because they are over the top tragic or outrageous, but because they represent the norm in the life of many models