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Body Fat and Eating Disorders

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Body Fat and Eating Disorders
Kathleen Hastings
SCI/241 Nutrition
March 26, 2013

Body Fat and Eating Disorders
Body composition is the proportion of your body when it comes to fat and fat-free mass (Jennifer Scott, 2008). If you have a higher proportion of fat-free mass compared to a lower portion of body fat, then you have a healthy body composition. However, someone that has an excessive amount of body fat is not as healthy and actually has a better chance of suffering from high blood pressure, heart disease, high cholesterol, diabetes, and cancer (Jennifer Scott, 2008).
Today’s society is actually going through an obesity epidemic. Instead of being outside all of the time and working or playing, the younger generation stays inside and plays video games. Another thing is that we are a generation of moving fast and being on the run 24/7. This leads people to make bad food decisions and eat a lot of fast food instead of cooking healthy food for their selves. Being constantly busy and on the go also means less time for exercise. These are all factors that go towards causing this obesity epidemic.
As bad of a problem as America has with obesity, we also have a rather large problem with people being obsessed with how they look and getting eating disorders which also causes health problems. One eating disorder is anorexia nervosa; it is a disorder that is complex and has three main features. Those features are that you refuse to maintain a healthy body weight, the fear to an extreme point of gaining weight, and a not normal body image (Smith and Segal, 2012). Some of the health problems associated with it is low blood pressure, slow heart rate, bone loss, heart failure, or kidney failure. Bulimia nervosa is another eating disorder that can cause a lot of problems. Bulimia is actually a combination of anorexia and binging. You over eat tremendously and then

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