To my utter delight, at last there is a book that lashes out at the spectra of thinness and beauty that sets off millions of our young girls, on an obsessive path of starvation and self-punishment.

Perfecting oneself has been mainly a matter of self-discipline and education for the most major part of human history. The association of perfection and thinness is a mysterious recent phenomenon, which is hard to explain. For young girls it’s a difficult cycle to get out of — media pressures, the continuous barrages of images of successful, “thin” women on screen and television, pages and volumes of slimming diets and exercises exhorting an “all out war” on fat. This in turn creates a paradigm of personal based on one’s body weight and “slim and trim” looks. It does not take time for it to develop in to a full-scale obsession, and the focal point of the lives of millions of young girls. And no wonder anorexia and bulimia have now become two of the commonest psychiatric disorders in this age group. Read more →

Recent research on behavioral characteristics displayed by anorexia nervosa (AN) and anorexia nervosa recovered (ANR) patients point strongly towards an anomalous pattern of activation of the pre-frontal cortex. Unlike in normal women, where food triggers off a reward system in the brain, AN and ANR (those who have recovered from anorexia nervosa) patients display an exaggerated startle effect, as part of an intrinsic defense reaction. In addition, they often salivate less, eat slower, and have a lower preference for fatty and sweet food, suggestive of a disruption in the central food-associated reward pathways. Read more →

Welcome to the third edition of Brain Blogging – a semi-monthly blog carnival that aims to review posts “related to the brain and mind that go beyond the basic sciences into a more human and multidimensional perspective.” Read more →