Eating Disorders Linked to Distorted Body Image

Do you see yourself as you really are? (Credit: Luis Muñoz)

Imagine looking in a mirror and hating what you see.

You eat alone, you may alternately starve and binge, you feel horrible about yourself. You’re probably tired and depressed too, to top it all off.

According to the National Eating Disorders Association, tens of millions of people in America alone are dealing with this every day. I have two daughters, and I often wonder why nutrition and positive body image are not part of basic education.

But taking my Mom hat off and putting my Scientist hat back on, it turns out eating disorders and having an inaccurate or distorted body image are linked. Maybe this is not too surprising. It’s still important to talk about though.

We found a strong association between Eating Disorders and Body Image Distortion, which independent studies published in established journals also confirm. In graphical form:
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CureTogether members who report Eating Disorders are 7x more likely to report Body Image Distortion than members with no Eating Disorders. This comes from a study of 747 people sharing data online for the past year.

For details on this finding and how it matches up with other studies, read on…

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Details of the CureTogether Eating Disorders-Body Image Distortion Finding

Among 87 people reporting Eating Disorders in this study, 58 (66.7%) reported also having Body Image Distortion, and the remaining 29 specifically reported not having Body Image Distortion.

Among 660 people reporting “No Eating Disorders” in this study, 66 (10%) reported having Body Image Distortion, and the remaining 594 people specifically reported not having Body Image Distortion.

This 66.7% vs. 10% difference represents a statistically significant relative risk of 6.7, with a 99% confidence interval of 5.1 – 8.8.
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Other Eating Disorders-Body Image Distortion Research

The importance of this finding is that using only self-reported data, we have found an association between eating disorders and body image distortion that has previously been explored only in clinical studies such as the following:

1. A study of teenage girls with anorexia and bulimia were found to overestimate their body size by 30%, more than twice the overestimation of the control group – http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/19851994

2. An fMRI study found that patients with anorexia actually process images of themselves differently than images of others at the brain level – http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/18406432

3. In a study of 2,800 women, researchers found that the women who overestimated their weight by 5% or more were significantly more likely to show disordered eating behavior than the women who accurately or under-estimated their weight – http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/17497706

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Self-Reported Data at CureTogether

CureTogether has been called “Yelp for health.” It is a collaboration of people from around the world volunteering to solve real problems in chronic conditions.

People self-report and rate symptoms and treatments for over 410 conditions. The top conditions at CureTogether are depression, anxiety, migraine, back pain, and vulvodynia.

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Take a peek at the top-rated:

- Eating Disorder Symptoms

- Eating Disorder Treatments

- Body Image Distortion Symptoms

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