With anorexia and bulimia the onset is in early adolescence in general but there is an alarming trend where it is starting to increase in frequency, pre-adolescence or pre-puberty and my suspicion is that it has a cultural aspect to it. For instance, my contemporaries had parents that grew up in a
Weight Watchers generation with TV, media, magazines, etc. so the cultural message was a bombardment of kind of what I called Burger King Psychology which is to try to have your cake and eat it too. So bombarded by cultural norms and models who looked thin, one can never be too rich or too thin and then contradicted by all these commercials for fast food, etc. etc. Given this country's obsession with use and appearance on thinness what's happening is that the second and third generations are hearing at the dinner table mom talk about the latest diet or dads make some disparaging comments about somebody in terms of their size, etc. etc. So what's happening is kids are absorbing that even pre-puberty and start to express concerns about their body as they start to grow up and increase their size and some become phobic of that.
