Category: Critical Analysis of Current knowledge

https://ualshowcase.arts.ac.uk/project/510139/cover

While I was converting my research and discussing projects and ideas in our class time, one of my classmates told me that someone in a previous year had tackled a similar subject, so I decided to look into it. I have contacted her and would love to talk further, but I also looked at some of her work and found inspiration and ideas I could adapt or learn from in her intervention. This alumnus ‘ name is Shuang Zheng, who works as an independent illustrator. She also researched eating disorders in young people and wanted to use her creativity to help people suffering from this. She created a self-help guidebook, which could be used by professional institutions, not necessarily as a standalone. This book specifically examines eating disorders in China and helps foster a more accurate perception of food, while also helping people in one’s society or close community better support these individuals. This is hopefully something that can help someone recover in the long term. She created a conceptual model of eating disorders and the different stages of someone who has this disorder, showing when someone is sick, in recovery, and normal, and shows different materials to show the different feelings that come with all of this. She also led art therapy workshops in London to help people become more aware of their feelings. In the book she created, she aims to address the different disorders and how people view them at different points throughout their course, as well as the illnesses that accompany them, and the importance of treating them seriously. (One concern is that if the person does not look ill, people do not think it is a problem; they are just getting too thin or too fat, or just want to lose weight.) This is also a book I would feel comfortable showing to a young child, and I would understand the importance of food and its relationship, because it is not always just about someone’s body but about using food as a regulating tool.

https://poosh.com/the-top-insecurities-in-women-and-how-to-overcome-them/

One of the main issues I have come across while completing my research is the amount of insecurities women suffer from, and all the work one has to do psychologically in order to get over them. Insecurities come in many forms, and some of the most common among women stem from their bodies, careers, intelligence, age, and relationships. One thing that has caused this is that, at times, we are always trying to reach perfection. Now that people are showing us their perfect lives on social media, however, perfection is not a real thing one can achieve, no matter how hard one tries. This leads people to develop very low self-esteem or a sense of inadequacy. According to psychologists, the top three insecurities women face are beauty, relationships, and intellectual ability. Beauty is a huge problem because women look at themselves with the hardest eyes and can become very harsh on themselves and feel as if they are not good enough because of their fisical appearance, this is a very hard balance because if there are certain procedures that make you feel amazing about yourself such as botox and facials you can use them but it is also important to understand and see your imperfections as something you can use to your advantage and embrace it because this are the things that actually make you unique you should be secure in your insecurities if that makes fence because it makes you unique, it is also very important to look at some of our inside qualities because beauty and fiscal appearances can leave and it is important to be secure on something other than that. Secondly women feel insecure about relationships women feel insecurity and as if they are not wanted or loved in a relationship, there is also the problem that women start to compare themselves as human beings we focus more on what we are missing than the things we have swell as looking for our partner to validate us instead of working on the reason why we might have our own insecurities to begin with we want to find security through them and in order to try to fix this we need to try to exercise actually self love and compassion for ourselves it is okay to not be perfect and to make mistakes without hurting ourselves or feeling as if we are not enough and out self worth is wrapped around that, one way this psychologist suggests we do this is through a confidence file whenever you are feeling insecure and as if you are not good enough you can bring it out and let it remind you of all your positive qualities instead of just your negative qualities, another insecurity I have seen in women is the lack of having a partner at a certain time as if they are not good enough if they are not married at a certain moment in their lives or as if they do not have a partner and this makes them less worthy but I believe this is something that is more cultural than others because women are valuable if they have a man next to them. The third and last one is women’s intellectual ability and how they feel insecure when they feel they have nothing to say or that what they are saying is not worth it. Women feel insecure for many other reasons, but whenever this happens, it is important to realize that everyone has their own insecurities and their own stories they are telling themselves to deal with them, but it is important to focus on hugging and loving your own insecurities because they are not even imperfections, they are what make you yourself.

This is a book I am currently reading that was recommended by one of my instructors, and I have realized there is so much behind people who have a problem with food, especially at a young age. This is the autobiography of a child actress, best known for her work in Scarily, in which she recounts her life and her childhood and career. She expresses how she really never wanted to be an actress it was her moms dream and she had such a crippling fear of not being enough for her mom since her mom made herself her best friend and was an extremely ill woman in more ways than one and had a dependency to her children and lived in fear swell as through manipulation to her children that she had been sick and it was gods miracle that she was alive. Her mother did not care what her child wanted, since her child always went along with whatever her mother wanted to make her happy, and just went along without being truthful to herself. She always felt a fear that she would be a disappointment to her mother and a fear of not making her happy, I believe, because her mother did not have the self-esteem to be herself and put everything onto her children and wanted to live life through them; however, this created a pattern of abuse. Her mother started to use food as a bargaining tool so if she did well in an acting audition she would tell her daughter they could go get ice cream but if this did not happen then this would not be a possibility, she also gave her child dangerous sports drinks for a child her age to get her to preform in the way it was asked such as sugar free Red Bulls to make sure she had energy. Her mother also was always tampering her appearance in order to try to make her natural beauty perfect which ment they would go through maintenance trip and as Net was a child she Never understood why her natural beauty was not good enough at it always had to be enhanced which from experiences I have heard from other people it is something that is very common in a lot of cultures and parents are always trying to make their children as perfect as possible instead of letting them be as they are naturally. Even though some people would be concerned with some of Nets behavior and say that she might have OCD her mother could not tolerate her child being anything other than perfect which lead to a lot of issues because some times as parents you have to realize your children imperfections and let them be or get them the help they need such as Net might have needed a therapist but because of her mothers fears it was something that was taken away or an opportunity she was not given.

This is a movie with depicts a girl going through anorexia and entering her last chance clinic since she has been sick for a long time and does not understand why she can’t just stop however an interesting piece of the movie is the fact that she is an artist and she has gone viral for her drawings and depictions however a girl suffering through an eating disorder killed herself after seeing one of her drawings and I want to look more into that and seeing how some creative expression can actually make things worse before they become any better and seeing different things that keep on happening through similar things such as ana sights and support groups to help people get thinner and show inspiration which is very complicated and shows how things can be used in more than one way and you have to be careful.

https://allyz.cargo.site/the-starving-artist

This are some of the pieces done by the artist Ally Zlatar who shows her own experience through eating disorders she suffers from personally. She suffered through eating disorders since the age of 13 and got officially diagnosed at the age of 17 with Anorexia specifically with the subgroup of binge and purge but it later on developed into bulimia at the age of 19 and orthorexia when she was 20 which has showed not just her relationship with food but with her body image and the way she sees herself. She talks about how she did not feel as if the consequences were seen in her body and the physical consequences but the emotional and psychological problems she feels her art and her book has given not just herself a voice but other people suffering through this and see it in a different perspective as an illness. She speaks about her illness as ‘inner torment’ and how living with this illnesses is somewhat unbearable and how she really struggled in expressing going through this and how it impacts her life and other people see themselves when they are sick.Her art represents her personal experience and she wants to show her body through her art work.

She expresses how people living outside an eating disorder consider them to be simple and that people suffering through them are just choosing to cut calories and trying to be thin and trying to hold some sort of control over their own lives. However when this people understand that it is actually an illness were they are trapped inside their own bodies. She expressed how she can’t separate herself to her eating disorder it is intertwined.

https://www.iadb.org/en/news/eating-disorders-public-health-emergency#:~:text=Medellín:%20anorexia%20and%20bulimia%20capital,10.2%20percent%20in%20the%20US.

Even though this is an old article it is showing the way that the town I want to be doing my interventions in has a serious problem. One of the main thing that they talk about is the fact that even though people think that this is a problem in upper economic circle it is actually a problem in lower income groups as well and it is a women struggle because only 2% of women around the world are able to look at themselves in the mirror and say that they are beautiful which speaks a lot about self esteem.From all of the problems surrounding food in the world we can see that it is not just a problem of women becoming extremely thin but the opposite as well showing the fact that 10% of women world wide become obese, 3.7% suffer from Anorexia Nervosa, 4.2% bulimia nervosa and 5% binge eat. This stats are outdated and they have more then doubled in the past two decades and have had a great effect of self esteem and women feeling ashamed of their bodies and not playing a part of everyday life.

In this article Medellin is called the anorexia and bulimia capital of the world, in the past it was known as the fashion capital of latin America and held the world record of eating disorders were 17.7% of girls suffer through eating disorders. A doctor decided to start chnages having to do with this called project skinny and have worked with many girls and exposed the problem through the city clearly this intervention has had little to offer effect seeing as how many girls are now suffering through eating disorders but because of fears of speaking about it and feeling it only looks a very specific way there have been many problems and I have to see how I can actually make my intervention one that might actually work and not be passed by as this intervention was.

https://www.ucl.ac.uk/news/2025/dec/body-image-issues-adolescence-linked-depression-adulthood

In this article from UCL talks about the fact that when young girls have low self esteem or issues with their bodies they start to see symptoms of eating disorders or depression when they become adults. This was a research study which was completed in 2,000 twins within England and it is used in order to understand how people not being happy with their bodies can effect their life latter on swell as looking at genetic and cultural reasons why this might be happening.

During this research it was found that the girls that suffered from dissatisfaction by the age of 16 are more affected in order to get an eating disorder and depression by the time they turn 21 this is still while looking at genetics and family background (I think this would be important for me to look at because I believe that most of the problem I see in Colombia it is cultural).

The reason why this test was so important was because when researching on twins was to compare identical twins who are practically the same and with fraternal ones share at least half. They used this in order to make sure that genetics is different from environmental factors. Most of the body dissatisfaction is based or explained by genetic factors and the rest by the environment they grow up in, for example life experiences.

It is not just something that happens with girls but with boys as-well but it is much higher in girls. What researchers think is the fact that society puts pressure on girls to have perfect bodies and there are unrealistic body standards especially when it comes to being thin and tiny (weight and shape).

The way that they suggest this is combated in the way that there should be regulation in social media and what people are allowed to see and the promotion of unrealistic and perfect bodies, no ideal weight when it comes to people and basing things on activities. There is also a lot of peer pressure, bullying and exposure to the supposed ideal body for girls.

This is the story we are hearing more and more about each day about how there are some genetic components as well as how life looks like and see the way that there are changes in how girls and boys can grow up without feeling pressures about their bodies but this will never go away because they see the bodies of others around them such as their parents and friends who have different genetics and experiences.

https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/cre2pelrpwzo

This was an article that was introduced to me by my tutor Elizabeth and it is an article that tackles a lot of issues and strong subject matter, it talks about a girls experience with the relationship within her and her body. She talks about Body Dysmorphia and how it is a mental health issue which makes people fixated about their appearance and that think that it is the end of the world when it might be something other people don’t even realize. This is a great issue that creates other disorders that affect people in their every day life and can show in a lot of different ways an symptoms such as always feeling insecure about how you look and feeling as if you have to be “perfect” all of the time and doing even impossible and unhealthy things to make it look better. In this article a girl named Charlotte speaks about how she developed anxiety when she was a teenager and how she tried to look perfect even though it took her hours and she was not even that happy about the results and made her miss out on key experiences in her life such as school events and after seeing this behaviors she got help from an in patient treatment and was diagnosed with body dysmorphia. Even though it took time to recover there were different activities she took place in which helped her through her treatment and found different activities which helped her get out of her head when it came to her appearance. She shares her story to make other people as if they are not strange and make sure that people know that there are ways of getting around this and make sure that it is not something that is treated as an isolated incident.

https://www.eatingrecoverycenter.com/resources/eating-disorders-history

This is one of the first things I looked at because I started to realize when eating disorders started. When did they become known? 

One of the main things I learned is that the diagnosis and research on eating disorders is the fact that it is a relatively new subject since they started to be diagnosed in the 1980s. Since this is such a new subject, it is clear that there is still a lot of misinformation and taboos surrounding these issues. which makes it a challenge because many people are really scared to speak about it or be open about their struggles, since it’s common for people to act as if everything is always perfect.