ACTs are a very difficult disorder to treat, and unfortunately they have been on the rise for the past 50 years, mainly because of the promotion of an unrealistic image of beauty and unhealthy eating habits.

In this article we are going to see the risk factors for suffering from ATD , explaining them in more detail and highlighting how they influence the appearance, especially, of anorexia and bulimia.

Risk factors for eating disorders

The cause of eating disorders or ED (anorexia, bulimia, binge eating disorder, and eating disorder not otherwise specified) is multifactorial. That is, several factors are involved in their formation, including genetic aspects, psychological characteristics , sociocultural factors and environmental stressors.

Although the specific weight of each of these factors and their components is not yet known with certainty, it is known that gender influences the chances of getting an ATT. Nine out of ten people diagnosed with one of these factors are women, and there is a greater risk of being diagnosed at the beginning of adult and child or pre-pubertal age .

Risk factors are those that facilitate the onset of eating disorders. They can be individual, group, and social factors. The combination of these different risk factors can lead to the development and maintenance of the disease.

Below we will look at these risk factors for eating disorders, grouped into individual factors, family factors, and social factors , with which we will better understand how these eating disorders occur.

Individual factors

Next we will see the factors associated with the person’s own characteristics, whether they are of biological or social origin.

1. Genetic predisposition

You are more likely to get an ATT if a family member, especially a parent, brother or sister, has been diagnosed with one in the past. It has been seen that, in the case of anorexia, genetics seems to explain about 70% of the vulnerability to receiving the diagnosis .

Genetics can make a person tend to eat unhealthy foods, causing them to eat more than they need or, conversely, consume fewer calories than needed to maintain body functions.

The weight of this factor can be increased by other environmental factors, such as family environments that place too much importance on weight or unhealthy eating habits, as well as factors such as the group of friends.

2. Psychological traits

There are certain personality traits, such as having too high a self demand, perfectionist tendencies close to obsession, cognitive rigidity and need for control that are closely related to having an eating disorder.

3. Low self-esteem

Low self-esteem involves making a negative and unsatisfactory assessment of oneself, which can affect any area of life, especially in relation to food and how one sees oneself in the mirror.

In the case of people with anorexia, this low self-esteem is easily observed by the way they see themselves, overestimating their body size .

Looking in the mirror or trying on clothes triggers a whole range of negative emotions that further aggravate low self-esteem and worsen the symptoms of ACT.

4. Adolescence

A hard and traumatic adolescence is a very common event in people who, as adults, are diagnosed with an ATD. It is in these years that there is a greater risk of developing an eating disorder, since this is when it usually makes its debut, although the diagnosis becomes more serious once the person has passed the age of majority.

Adolescence is a complicated stage, in which a person’s personality, social role and self-esteem are in full development, being more vulnerable to a social environment in which great importance is given to body image.

5. Female sex

As we mentioned before, of every 10 cases of ACT, 9 are women and 1 is a man . As can be seen, there are many more possibilities that being a woman she can be diagnosed with one of the eating disorders.

Family factors

Now let’s look at the factors that come directly from the family, how they relate to the potential victim of an ATT, and how they handle the diagnosis.

6. Unstructured family environment

In those families in which there is no stable and safe structure, a breeding ground is generated to develop an ATT in some of its members, especially adolescent girls.

7. Overprotective family environment

Sometimes, wanting to protect the members of a family is done in such an exaggerated and toxic way that it contributes to psychopathology among its members.

There is more risk of an ATT diagnosis for a person who has experienced too rigid, controlling and demanding family dynamics e.

8. Stressful family experiences

Changes in how the family is formed, whether through separation, death of a member or birth of a brother or sister that has not been handled in the best way, can make a family member see it as especially traumatic.

It may also have happened that, within the same family, one of the members has physically or sexually abused another family member, causing the latter to be traumatized for life and to cope with the problem through the symptoms of ACT.

Social Factors

Finally we will see the risk factors that come from the society itself , how it is structured and the way it relates to and treats its members, especially women.

9. Current beauty canon

Although in recent years the “curvy” seems to be wearing more, besides the fact that they are beginning to be seen as attractive to a wider range of women with all kinds of physiques, the canon of female beauty is still that of a thin woman, without any fat or muscle.

Excessive thinness has been extolled in multiple media , especially in fashion shows and the covers of the magazines of the heart.

Although great changes are being achieved, many women, influenced by these media, continue to reject the idea of looking fat, seeing it as something really grotesque, and defending that extreme thinness is ‘healthy’.

10. Social pressure regarding image

Related to the previous point, in the last decades, both men and women have been giving more importance to image.

Not only are we talking about women being bombarded with images of extreme thinness as synonymous with beauty, but they are also pressured by family members, friends, and others to look alike.

This is not only visible in women, it also occurs in men, but given that the male beauty canon is very different, prioritizing extreme bodybuilding and pressing to be fibrillated, vigorexia, the disorder associated with this, is not an ATT.

11. Some sports and professions

There are certain sports, such as dance or synchronised swimming, in which the appearance of an ATT may be favoured, due to the way in which the image is treated when practising this type of activity. Other sports in which there is a risk of a great obsession with weight and what you eat are those in which you compete for weight categories.

People who work in fashion, show business or are actors and actresses also run the risk of attaching too much importance to their body image, and may enter the murky world of ATD.

12. Physical harassment

People who have been teased and taunted about their physique, especially as adolescents and children, combined with a feeling of insecurity may end up developing an obsession with their body image , and evolve into something more serious.

13. The sizing system

The sizes of clothes, shoes and other items of clothing are not a unified system. Each manufacturer applies its own standards as to which garment should be classified in one size or another. This means that an M size in one store may be equivalent to an S or L size in other stores.

It may seem banal, but it is not, especially if you are a woman who has always thought she had one size, changes shops and sees that the same size fits her, and decides to lose weight, even though she is already thin. It is very difficult to know one’s exact size .

According to the report “Not finding your size promotes anorexia”, about 40% of the population decides to go on a diet when, while shopping, they can’t find clothes in their size , or they thought they had one and it turns out that, in the end, they are too small.

14. Pages promoting ACTs

There are people who have these ATTs who, far from seeking help in trying to get out of the well or trying to understand its problems, make an apology for it , although this is not difficult to understand if one understands the way in which the canon of beauty is still in force.

The existence of pages like Pro-Ana and Pro-Mia not only defend having an ATD as a way of life, but also dare to give advice to ‘help’ other girls to continue with their anorexia or bulimia.

They also teach how to trick family members into believing that they are eating or that their body is just like that because of genetics. Access to this type of page is very easy and, despite the fact that more than one has been closed, they emerge as if it were an epidemic.

Bibliographic references:

  • Portela de Santana, M. L., da Costa Ribeiro, H., Mora Giral, M. and Raich, R. M. (2012). The epidemiology and risk factors of eating disorders in adolescence; a review. Nutr. Hosp. 27(2), 391-401.
  • Association against Anorexia and Bulimia (n.d.). Association against Anorexia and Bulimia. Barcelona, Spain. Retrieved from: http://www.acab.org/es.