Most people know that eating disorder will have bad effect on one’s health. Nowadays, thanks to the good standard of living, there are more and more people with eating disorder. This habit empowered with inactive life style, surely will result in poor health condition, physically and mentally. Most of the time, the two conditions appear simultaneously.

Researchers have been trying to find out the ultimate root cause for eating disorder. Many of them came up with various causes, but overall it can be stated that this condition mainly caused by poor control of one’s mind. When we come to the term of mind control, there is only one term that is worth noticing, mental representation.

As stated in previous writings, mental representation is the natural way for individual to perceive his/her external experiences. These experiences can be related directly to his/her own condition or to surrounding. The mental representation that is made by someone will affect his/her own behavior which will result back again to his/her external experience. And as time goes by, the cycle will repeat again by itself. This mental representation is the foundation habits creation. Since eating disorder can be perceived as habits, then it must be related to mental representation, directly.

There are many kinds of mental representation that can result negative behavior. This kind of mental representation mainly related to the creation of guilt, shame, anger and many more. One example of mental representation that can cause you to have eating disorder is distorted body image.

Researchers from the University of Maastricht in the Netherlands recently tried a different approach. First they asked individuals from two groups to rate their own attractiveness. One group had symptoms of eating disorders. People in the other, control group had been chosen because their (normal) body sizes were similar to those of the disordered group. The investigators presented picture everyone's bodies, with the heads
cropped out, to two panels of evaluators. Somehow, despite the size similarity, both sets of evaluators rated those with eating disorders as less attractive-in accord with the ratings the disordered individuals gave themselves.

In contrast, the control subjects overestimated their own attractiveness, suggesting they have a biased, protective body image.

The significance of the study is that when it comes to treat people with eating disorders, people helper might teach them to focus on their attractive features.