Discuss Explanations for Anorexia Nervosa

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Discuss explanations for Anorexia Nervosa (AN) (24 marks) Anorexia Nervosa is an eating disorder characterised by extreme body dissatisfaction and dieting, weight below 85% of normal weight for age and height and loss of three consecutive menstrual cycles in women (amenorrhoea). Evolutionary explanations justify AN as a reflection of behaviours that were adaptive in the EEA. Characteristics of AN such as denial of hunger, restlessness and high activity levels would have been advantageous when food levels were short and people needed to move around looking for food- This is also known as the ‘Adaptive to Flee Famine Hypothesis’ (AFFH). Guisinger (2003) also supports this suggests that anorexics perseverance when not having eaten was a very profitable characteristic when needed in the EEA and people who are now anorexic in this generation have been ancestrally passed this willingness to not eat which is now not needed due to the volume of food available to people in the UK. This explanation relates to having the mental strength of being able to move on despite increasing hunger, this would seem to be cognitive explanation which shows this approach to be holistic and non-reductionist which actually makes it more of a plausible rationalization as we know that the human brain is very complex and there may not be one approach that can express the entire reasoning for AN. Surbey (1987) suggest that adolescent girls’ desire to control their weight represents an evolutionary adaptation in which in ancestral girls delayed the onset of sexual maturation in response to cues about the probability of poor reproductive success i.e. these women would have thought “it is not ideal to have a child therefore I will starve myself so I am unable to carry a child”. The ability to delay reproduction is adaptive because it enables a female to avoid giving birth at a time when
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