As mentioned earlier, eating disorders are generally caused due to emotional upheaval, stress, or any event that causes a consistent lowering of self esteem. There are numerous factors that can cause eating disorders.

The general consensus arrived at by physicians, counselors, as well as researchers, is that it is not just a simple problem caused by any simple factor. Eating disorders are basically very complicated issues that have been given a simple and easy-to-understand term.

The illness itself is very complex, and is caused by a large number of factors. These factors need not always appear singly, a person could suffer from an eating disorder under the influence of more than one such factor at a time. Let us discuss some of the issues that cause eating disorders now.

Social Causes

Many times, people suffering from eating disorders are unable to maintain proper relationships with family, friends, and loved ones. These people have very disturbed personal lives, and tend to resort to food or a lack of it to offset their shortcomings or inabilities.

Eating disorders also manifest themselves in people with a history of abuse. Abuse could be physical, emotional, or sexual. Such people are almost always introverts. Their inability to communicate and maintain proper relationships with their family and peers drives them more into isolation, into themselves, and then they strive to seek attention, desperately, by indulging, consciously or otherwise in eating binges or starving themselves.

families can influence eating disorders

Doctors have realized that the family plays a very important role in the development of eating disorders. There are certain families where there is a lot of emphasis on fitness, appearance, and other such physical aspects of life.

In such families the chances of one of the children suffering from an eating disorder are higher than say, in families where physical appearance is not a rigid benchmark to life. Overprotectiveness can also be one of the reasons.

Such attitudes result often in the person feeling buried under an avalanche, of being swamped by the other members of the family, and make them uncommunicative, abrupt, introverted, the classic breeding ground for an eating disorder to ferment.

Psychological Causes

Studies have shown that most people with eating disorders have a very low opinion about themselves. The low self esteem can be innate; their basic physical structure could cause them to feel inferior in comparison to others.

On the other hand, they could be people who set really high standards in their lives. These standards apply to their physical appearance as well, standards that one cannot realistically achieve or maintain over a prolonged time span. People that fall under this category are basically huge achievers, but it is this very urge to achieve that is the cause of their undoing.

These people are, in other words, perfectionists, and since perfection itself is basically an illusion, their inability to achieve the high standards they set causes them to suffer from low self esteem.

Excessive Media Exposure

Another factor that is seen in modern day societies, especially in the suburbs and cities, is peer pressure.

Generally, there has been a huge global shift towards being ‘healthy’. This is a very complex equation, with various factors playing equally important roles. The shift by itself has happened with advancements in science and technology, which has in turn led to newer discoveries, good and bad, about our bodies and the illnesses that affect it.

Other factors influencing this shift have been pollution and industrialization, for example. The media has also contributed hugely to this shift – the images flashed consistently on TV are all of slim, thin, good-looking people. Fat people are not projected from the angle of being healthy.

Fat people are almost always portrayed as funny, likeable even, but never the guy that walks away with the goodies at the end. Looking good has become the norm nowadays, aided by the proliferation of gyms, and the development of the health and pharmaceutical industry into a multi-trillion dollar behemoth. And the youth of today are mostly mentally ill-equipped to handle such a situation.

Biochemical Causes

Besides, there could also be a biochemical side to eating disorders. Studies are still being undertaken in this area of science, and the results are not yet conclusive enough to establish a solid link between the chemistry and biology of our bodies and eating disorders.