1.The biomedical, psychological, and feminist mondels differ in explaining eating disorders. The biomedical model offers important scientific research about possible physiological causes of eating problems and the physiological dangers of purging and starvation. However, this model adopts medical treatment strategies that may disempower and traumatize women. The pychological model identifies eating problems as “multidimesional disorders”, that are influenced by biological, psyhological, and cultural factors. The feminist model asserts that eating problems are gendered. This model explains why the vast majority of people with eating problems are women.

2. Attributing the etiology of eating problems primarily to a womans striving to attain a certai beauty ideal is also problematic because it labels common way that women cope with pain as estentially appearance-based disorders. One blatant example of sexism is the notion that women’s foremost worry is about their appearance. By focusing on the emphasis on slenderness, the eating problems literature falls into the same trap of assuming that the problem reflect women’s “obsession” with appearance. Sexual ause was the most common trauma that the women related to the origins of their eating problems. Results of a number of incidence studies indicate that between one-third and two-thirds of women who have eating problems have been abused.

3. Tomas Silber (1986) asserts that many well-trained professionals have either misdiagnosed or delayed their diagnoses of eating problems mong Afrian American and Latina women due to stereotypical thinking that these problems are restricted to white women . When African American women or Latinas are diagnosed, their eating problems tend to be more severe due to extended processes of starvation prior to intervention. Retha Powers (1989), an african american women, desribes being told not to worry about her eating problems since “fat is more acceptable in the black community”.

BY ALLYSA