This Beautiful Woman Shares Photos Of Her Near Fatal Battle With Anorexia To Raise Awareness
This Beautiful Woman Shares Photos Of Her Near Fatal Battle With Anorexia To Raise Awareness
According to statistics collected in 2013, it is estimated that anorexia nervosa afflicted two million people worldwide. More commonly known as anorexia, this disorder and complications stemming from it, were the cause of 600 deaths globally in the same statistic year. It has also been found that people suffering from this disorder have the highest incidences of death than any other psychological disorder. Twenty percent of anorexics prematurely die from complications related to their eating disorder, including suicide, kidney and heart failure. The age group that anorexia primarily affects are people in their teens and twenties, but studies have shown that this disorder has manifested in children as young as six years of age and in adults as old as seventy-six. The anorexic’s self-esteem is dependent on how much they weigh and how thin they look. So there is apprehension in becoming fat or loathing with how their body looks, and that is mostly motivated by perceiving a loss of control over their own lives, insecurity and the pressure to be perfect.
These few facts and statistics presented here about anorexia nervosa barely scratch the tip of the proverbial iceberg concerning all the information and statistics about anorexia. It is a frightening disorder that has the potential to claim many lives and that’s because, in general, people are uninformed about the complexity and the seriousness of it and the wide range of people it impacts and can affect. Gemma Walker knows this fact all too well because she experienced her own near-fatal battle with anorexia. She was a victim of anorexia nervosa for many years. As a 14-year-old female, she was diagnosed with anorexia and bulimia, and at one point during her suffering from the eating disorders, she was given 48 hours to live. She is now 22 years old and has since recovered from her eating disorders and the damage they did to her body.
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Ms. Walker brought her story detailing her experience with the life-threatening eating disorders to news and media outlets, with the hope and intent of educating and making people aware of how potentially fatal anorexia can be. She also displayed graphic pictures of herself while afflicted with the disorders, and they depicted a very malnourished human female who looked as though her frail body was composed of nothing more than internal organs with skin stretched over her skeletal frame. Weighing only 63 pounds or 4.5 stone, there were barely any signs of muscle mass, which was probably consumed and used as nourishment by her own body in order to survive. There were also pictures showing how much she has progressed and what she has achieved health-wise. She looked healthy and happy because she finally beat the eating disorders. She had a strong emotional support system around her that included her parents, loved ones and doctors. She also had the will to live. A lot of people aren’t that fortunate.
Society has projected on itself perceptions of perfection that cause people to believe they aren’t flawless if they aren’t thin. But who’s responsible for that? Did it start with the beauty and fashion industry, the advertising industry or the sports industry? Where from did society get its ideas of perfection? Images are used in the media to project the image of perfection that is upheld by society, to brainwash people into believing that if they aren’t thin, they aren’t accepted; they aren’t highly regarded; they aren’t perfect. It would seem that people who subject themselves to the pressures of society’s ideas of perfection would go to any extent to achieve that perceived flawlessness at the expense of their own health and well-being. People are degraded by others because they don’t fit that image of perfection because they aren’t thin. So to stop the criticism, bullying and possibly alienation by others, the down-trodden submit to what society thinks perfection is. They starve themselves, and sometimes, kill themselves to be perfect. Society needs to learn acceptance of all people no matter how they look and forget about perfection. Perfection isn’t important in the grand scheme of things and isn’t worth sacrificing health and well-being for.
