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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.