The Eating Disorder’s Society

Abstract

Feeding has been subjected to a process of medicalization throughout history that has caused its perception to be assimilated to the intake of nutrients. However, it is necessary to conceive feeding as a total social phenomenon. That is to say, a phenomenon that impregnates food and the practices that surround it with different meanings. It is therefore necessary to understand how certain social dynamics (secularization, rationalization, bureaucratization) have modified the way we feed ourselves and how we interpret food itself. This, in turn, has generated a series of negative meanings that have influenced how we perceive the body and the image of people. The calculability of nutrients and an unrealistic and unattainable image canon for people have been installed. Thus, a social food imaginary has been created based on a whole series of myths that are transmitted through social networks and that produce that the society in which we live has become an obesogenic and lipophobic society. It is therefore necessary to understand how the social imaginary of fat and fatness has been constructed in order to understand how people perceive their body image and how this can be altered.