Melbourne Holds Title In Australia For Having Most Number Of People Suffering From Eating Disorders
New statistics show that Melbourne is the top electorate in Australia which has the maximum number of reports of those suffering from eating disorders between the ages of 5 and 25, with 3,174 cases.
Victorian electorates constitute more than half of the nation's trouble spots. Among the top ten anorexia hotspots, Victoria occupied five, Queensland two and one each for the Australian Capital Territory, New South Wales and Western Australia, reported Daily Mail.
Fraser in Australian Capital Territory has 2,911 cases, followed by Lalor in Victoria with 2,843 cases. Next comes Holt in Victoria and Ryan in Queensland, both with 2,606 cases, followed by Gorton in Victoria and Rankin in Queensland with 2,536 and 2,432 cases, respectively.
It was also noted that a lot of women are developing eating disorders due to societal pressure to lose weight quickly after pregnancy. Most of them are new mothers and those going through menopause and are getting affected by it.
Christine Morgan, director of the Butterfly Foundation, said that societal pressures along with fixation on dieting as well as celebrity mothers who lose weight quickly after pregnancy leads to poisoning of the minds of young women to becoming anorexic, bulimic or suffer from binge eating disorder.
She continued that it was sad to see but women who had just given birth give a lot of emphasis on how quickly they can lost their pregnancy weight. She also added that once women hit menopause, the body usually ends up putting on some weight, and this leads to women giving in to eating disorders.
A Melbourne mother, Belinda Caldwell's daughter, has been suffering from anorexia nervosa since the age of 16. She told AAP that she slept in the same bad as her daughter for five months so that she could stop her from exercising compulsively. Three years down the line, her daughter has been recovering well.
One million Australians suffer from eating disorders and many of them don't admit to it. A few of the people take more than 15 years to reach out for help which reduces their chances of quick recovery.
The Foundation Forum at the Parliament House heard that one of five sufferers of anorexia commit suicide.