The Biology Behind Eating Disorders

For many decades, the popular narrative surrounding anorexia nervosa was that it was an emotional disorder springing from profound cultural pressures combined with dysfunctional family dynamics. Teenage girls, typically, would refuse to eat in an obsessive bid to lose weight. They would imagine themselves to be fat, even if mirrors and scales demonstrated otherwise. Because of the surfeit of images of rail-thin preteen models cluttering the pages of trendy fashion magazines, it was easy to imagine this theory to be true. It made sense if some clinicians regarded anorexia as the inevitable result of a "you-can-never-be-too-rich-or-too-thin" culture.