Teen Eating Disorders: What You Need to Know

You are altogether beautiful my love, there is no flaw in you. – Song of Solomon 4:7

When you consider the fact that the media, entertainment industries, and magazines are all presenting women (and men) as flawless, it’s no wonder that eating disorders are becoming increasingly more common.

Photoshopped images are creating the impression that beauty is more important than anything else, and that beautiful people are the ones who have it all together.

Idealizing the Barbie-like figure – tall and slender – as the epitome of beauty isn’t new. The fashion industry has been guilty of this for decades. However, the consequences for young girls who don’t have that kind of body are extreme.

Teen girls already struggling with the difficulties of growing up are under ever more pressure. Every year there’s a new diet fad or fashion trend that companies pressurize young adults to care about.

For example, magazines and websites tell young people that they need to have perfect eyebrows or hair like the hottest celebrities. There seems to be no end to the campaigns that fixate on unrealistic and unhealthy image expectations.

No one tells the young people that Photoshop has more to do with how celebrities appear in magazines than anything else. Instead, beauty is being defined, discussed, marketed, advertised and edited into something that, allegedly, can be bought with time, makeup and clothes.

Young people are exposed to constant beauty comparisons: “Madeline is prettier than Amy”. There is so much value being placed on beauty in modern society. It’s valued more than intelligence and integrity. It’s become an obsession.

This article serves two purposes: to highlight the things that result in eating disorders and to give parents, friends, teachers, etc. advice for helping teens who are battling with eating disorders.

What this article doesn’t intend to focus on weight-loss. The goal is to give you tools that will help teens adjust the way they think about their weight. It’s important that supporters and caretakers of teens with body image issues find ways of helping them without making weight the focus.

Top Three Causes of Teen Eating Disorders

There are many contributing factors for teens developing eating disorders, but here are the top three:

1. Too Much Focus on Image in Our Culture

For teen girls already dealing with the challenges of growing up, the way culture and society focus on image can cause feelings of self-loathing to develop quite quickly. It may start with wondering “why don’t I look like ______?”

These thoughts don’t immediately focus on weight, but that’s where it starts. Concerns about the way they look in comparison to girls features in magazines and on TV are the seeds of future weight-related issues and eating disorders.

Teens who go on to develop eating disorders tend to talk about themselves in critical ways, judging themselves harshly and unkindly against the unrealistic models in magazines. It may start with a sense of not being good enough, not being pretty enough, not being tall enough.

Not being thin enough is the natural progression of those types of thoughts. When a teen is consumed by an eating disorder, they don’t just despise their body type for not being good enough – those feelings extend to their entire being.

When there’s so much focus in society on the outward appearance, teens feel the pressure, which is a huge factor in causing eating disorders. If there was less of this focus, the prevalence of eating disorders in teenagers would likely be less.

2. Personal Experiences: Being Told They’re Not Beautiful

It’s not just the messages that teens receive from magazines and the media about beauty. People around them also convey messages that can contribute to teens growing to despise their bodies.

Parents, extended family, and peers participate in the spoken and unspoken culture of comparison – sometimes without even realizing they’re doing it. When teens are surrounded by these kinds of messages, it’s harder than ever for them to accept their own bodies as being beautiful.

Comments such as, “oh, you’re having a second serving?” or “oh, you can’t get those jeans to fasten?” can be devastating for a teen’s developing self-image. Teens are already facing identity struggles as their bodies change during puberty, and they don’t need any additional pressure.

When they’re given these subtle messages that their bodies are in some way unacceptable and they should be worried about their weight, it’s enough to tip them into an eating disorder. Teens are incredibly sensitive at this stage in their development. It’s very easy for them to become paranoid about themselves.

3. Not Receiving Enough Positive Messages About Their Value

Low self-esteem is a common problem in young adults because so much of their value seems to be tied to their abilities – whether academic, sports, music or arts. They’re under incredible pressure to match up to some kind of idealized standard of “success”, and in the midst of this, there’s often a lack of positivity about their achievements.

Naturally, parents want their children to succeed, but this can be counterproductive when increasing the pressure to perform results in feelings of not being good enough.

When teens don’t get positive messages about their achievements, they are especially prone to beat themselves up about their bodies and their achievements. They need someone on the outside to believe in them, encourage them and build them up.

Otherwise, they become increasingly convinced that they need to do more and be better and look better (by losing weight) in order to be good enough to be valued.

Helping Teens with Eating Disorders

If you know a teen who has developed an eating disorder or seems to be on the verge of developing one, here are some techniques you can use to help them:

1. Love Them

Never underestimate the value of loving a person and validating them by reminding them how perfect they are without needing to change a thing. In a world that is constantly telling teens that they have to look a certain way, it’s important to be a voice that contradicts those messages and counteracts the teen’s own inner critic.

If you can teach them what self-love is, you can help them break free of a cycle of negativity. To do this, you need to model your own self-worth and self-belief. Let the teens in your life see that your body size is not your identity and that beauty is more than skin deep.

2. Educate Them

It may sound counterproductive to talk about educating a teen at risk of an eating disorder about healthy methods of weight loss, but it can be beneficial. Educating them isn’t about encouraging fixation with weight loss. Rather it’s really the lesser of two evils.

Think of it this way, if a teen is already obsessed with losing weight and are using extreme strategies – starving themselves or throwing up – to achieve it, then it can’t hurt to try to teach them that such methods are not effective in the long run.

When teens are struggling with eating disorders, their weight is such an obsession for them that the only conversations they’re willing to listen to are conversations about weight. In such a situation, rather than trying to discuss something else, the best strategy is to offer practical advice.

For example, you could start by questioning how effective their disordered eating is for keeping weight off. Of course, for some teens, their strategy is working, but in the early stages, the majority will find that their weight fluctuates dramatically between losses and gains.

One aspect of weight loss that it can be beneficial to educate teens about is brain training. You can explain to them that the more they withhold or throw up necessary nutrients, vitamins and energy (food) from their body, the more their brain is being trained to hold on to fat when it gets some.

If a teen is restricting food the majority of the time but occasionally allows themselves a regular meal, their brain will instruct their body to handle the nutrition differently than if they were eating normally. Metabolism is linked to our food intake.

For example, people who eat breakfast in the morning have a faster metabolism than people who don’t eat breakfast as a means of losing weight. The strategy being used to lose weight is actually telling the body to slow their metabolism down, making weight loss more difficult. It can be hard to get teens who have become obsessed with their weight to understand this, but it’s absolutely worth trying.

Talking to teens with eating disorders about effective weight loss strategies might make you feel uncomfortable and worried that you’re going to make things worse. Counselors recognize, however, that engaging teens in conversations about weight is actually necessary for their recovery.

Making weight a topic that you refuse to talk about can be detrimental to recovery. It is important, however, to make weight just one topic that can be discussed, rather than being the only one.

To best help teens struggling with eating disorders, you can acknowledge how important weight is to them, but show them that there are more healthy, self-loving means of losing weight.

3. Choose Your Language Carefully

There are a number of words that can be described as trigger words for teens struggling with body image difficulties. These words include “fat,” “heavy,” “big boned,” “muscular.”

For young people with eating disorders, these words have meanings that contribute to their negative feelings about their bodies. It is possible, however, to redefine those words and the impact they have.

For example, in recent years there has been a concerted effort to raise the profile of plus-size models. This industry is focused on re-defining how the world conceptualizes beautiful. The message of plus-size models is that they are just as beautiful and worthy and valuable as any other model.

Other campaigns have focused on hiring models with skin conditions such as vitiligo. They aim to redefine beauty with the message that skin imperfections actually make you beautiful.

What these examples show is that the meaning we usually attribute to words doesn’t have to be their only meaning. Might it be possible for the teen you’re worried about to see their weight in a new light – as a good thing?

Many counselors will agree that with eating disorders weight loss is actually a symptom. Like any other addiction and obsession, the way we think or feel about our bodies are symptoms of deeper-rooted issues that are connected to a failure to understand our true worth, in Christ.

That’s why the most effective way to defeat the lies we believe about ourselves is to focus instead on the declaration that we are “fearfully and wonderfully made” (Psalm 139:14). Everyone is, of course, different, and to compare ourselves to others is a certain way of robbing ourselves of joy.

Christian counselors can help teens (and adults!) to internalize the truth of how much they are loved by God – so much that He sent His Son to die for the very body that they are so focused on despising.

People dealing with body image difficulties can find it very hard to internalize these truths. Persistence and patience are necessary, and a willingness to talk to the teen in your life about the things they’re worried about. It is these conversations that can open the door to further conversations about healthy eating habits and God’s plan for their lives.

The purpose of these conversations is to bring hope to young people battling with body image that they can be free from obsessive thoughts about their body and can come to love themselves as God loves them, appreciating their true beauty in Christ.