Imagine yourself coming home from an exhausting day of school and you walk in on your sister in the bathroom; as she is leaning over the toilet, trying to make herself vomit. Before you think about walking away and ignoring it, go tell an adult because the consequences of her continuing this could be deadly.

Over 8,000,000 people in the United States, 90% who are girls, are anorexic or bulimic. But why do people feel the urge to be skinny? There are a lot of different reasons why people start an eating disorder. It could be that they are stressed out, upset about something in their life, or maybe the pressure of society to be thin. The most common ages that people develop an eating disorder is between the ages of 13 and 17, and emotional and physical changes could interfere with their decision to develop an eating disorder.

The two most common eating disorders are Anorexia Nervosa and Bulimia Nervosa. The people who are Anorexic are literally scared to gain weight, and to make sure their fear doesn’t become reality they take extreme measures. They limit the amount of food they eat, either vomit or even take laxatives. The other eating disorder, Bulimia Nervosa, however is very much different to that of Anorexia

Nervosa. Bulimia is when people binge eat, otherwise known as eating a lot more than the average person would in a certain amount of time in an amount of time; and then they prevent themselves from eating by, over exercising, forcing themselves to vomit, or fasting.

People have said that the pressures just got to them; the pressure to be successful in life, to be thin like the celebrities, and the pressure to be perfect.

The truth about this all is that nobody is perfect and even some stars struggle with their body image. Demi Lovato is a singer/actress who has struggled for many years with an eating disorder. Being bullied for her weight when she was eight and from that experience she started compulsively overeating. From the time she was eight she has had a problem with eating and until 2010 when everything just got to out of control and she decided to take some responsibility in her life and checked herself into rehab. Demi said “It was a way of expressing my own shame on myself, on my body.” Adding she says, “I was matching the inside to my outside. And there were some times where my emotions were just so built up, I didn’t know what to do. The only way that I could get instant gratification was through an immediate release on myself.” Demi Lovato currently still struggles with her eating disorder; saying, “I’m not perfect. It’s a daily battle.”

Eating disorders can’t be easily solved. People would have to go through a long line of counseling and rehab to recover. You see people with eating disorders look in the mirror and just see fat even if they are skinny, like author Laurie Halse Anderson said in her book Wintergirls, “I lift my arm out of the water. It's a log. Put it back under and it blows up even bigger. People see the log and call it a twig. They yell at me because I can't see what they see. Nobody can explain to me why my eyes work different than theirs. Nobody can make it stop. ” To make sure nobody ever feels like this we need to teach them that they are beautiful in their own way.