Tca Quotes

“The sexual competition model of eating disorders has two interlocking components. The first component is based on the universal male preference for a nubile -hourglass- body shape and the fact that women tend to accumulate body weight as they age, with the result that relative thinness is a reliable cue of youth and reproductive potential. The second component is specific to modern societies: as fertility declines and the age of reproduction shifts upward, women tend to retain an attractive nubile shape for longer, which increases the importance of thinness as an attractive display. At the same, a number of converging trends contribute to intensify real and perceived mating competition among women, especially for long-term partners. Specifically, socially imposed monogamy reduces the number of available men; urban living dramatically increases the number of potential desirable competitors; and the media paint a visual landscape full of unrealistically thin, attractive women. The net outcome of these social changes is a process of runaway sexual competition that leads to an exaggerated desire for thinness in girls and women. Ironically, the process is largely driven by female intrasexual competition rather than direct male choice, and the resulting -ideal body- may be too thin to be maximally attractive to men.”
― Marco del Giudice, Evolutionary Psychopathology: A Unified Approach

“Mortality in Eating Disorders is partly caused by the medical complications of starvation and bingeing-purging, but suicide risk is also elevated. Suicide accounts for about 20% of deaths in anorexic patients; unsurprisingly, the risk is higher in AN-Bingeing/Purging than in AN-Restricted.”
― Marco del Giudice, Evolutionary Psychopathology: A Unified Approach

“In modern societies, for example, the media expose people to a relentless stream of images of unrealistically attractive "competitors" -an artificial, evolutionarily novel kind of social stimulus. It has been hypothesized that such exposure hyperactivates the evolved mechanisms that regulate female competition for attractiveness and status, thus contributing to the rising incidence of eating disorders.”
― Marco del Giudice, Evolutionary Psychopathology: A Unified Approach

“Runaway competition for thinness generates an evolutionary mismatch, which drives up the risk of maladaptive eating symptons; in particular Abed suggested that AN arises as a direct consequence of competition for thiness, whereas BN may stem from attempts to maintaina nubile body shape.”
― Marco del Giudice, Evolutionary Psychopathology: A Unified Approach

“Runaway competition for thinness generates an evolutionary mismatch, which drives up the risk of maladaptive eating symptons; in particular Abed suggested that AN arises as a direct consequence of competition for thinness, whereas BN may stem from attempts to maintaina nubile body shape.”
― Marco del Giudice, Evolutionary Psychopathology: A Unified Approach

“Androgens in Eating Disorders show an intriguing pattern: while anorexics tend to have low testosterone, there are indications that bulimia is associated with exposure to high levels of prenatal androgens. In addition, polycystic ovarian syndrome (PCOs, a condition caused by elevated androgens) has been associated with increased BN risk but decreased AN risk.”
― Marco del Giudice, Evolutionary Psychopathology: A Unified Approach

“A better understanding of eating disorders and their symptons can be gained by considering the nature of two self-reinforcing cycles that may be labeled the self-starvation and bingeing-purging cycle.”
― Marco del Giudice, Evolutionary Psychopathology: A Unified Approach

“Ferguson and colleagues also reviewed that thin models in the media have comparatively small effects on body dissatisfaction, and mainly on women with preexisting weight concerns and/or high neuroticism. Instead, the largest and most consistent effects are those of mating competition in the peer network -that is, the number of attractive and available women in one's inmediate social environment (for example, friends and colleagues).”
― Marco del Giudice, Evolutionary Psychopathology: A Unified Approach

“The pubertal surge of sex hormones plays a major role in the onset of eating symptoms in females, as shown by the fact that the heritability of Eating Disorders increases sharply at mid-puberty in girls, but not in boys. In particular, binge eating is strongly modulated by the interaction of estrogens and progesterone acrosss the menstrual cycle, consistent with the role played by these hormones in the regulaion of hunger and feeding. Both the frequency of bingeing and its heritability peak after ovulation, in tandem with rising progesterone levels.”
― Marco del Giudice, Evolutionary Psychopathology: A Unified Approach

“A thinness ideal at the social and individual levels is not the only precondition for the bingeing-purging cycle: bingeing require easy access to large amounts of high-calorie food, and most purging methods are impractical without modern plumbing and sanitation.”
― Marco del Giudice, Evolutionary Psychopathology: A Unified Approach

“Food restriction does not necessarily lead to self-starvation; in fact, a common effect of sustained weight loss is a tendency to binge whenever food is available (typically with feelings of automaticity and loss of control). Common triggers for binges include tempting food and excessive hunger, but also interpersonal stressors and strong emotions. To compensate for impulsive overeating, some people start to adopt purging behaviors such as vomiting and laxative use. The combination of bingeing and purging may lead to the onset of a self-reinforcing cycle. Especially in the early stages of the cycle, bingeing and purging cause intense guilt, shame and anxiety. Those negative emotions may then trigger more binges or prompt renewed attempts to restrict food, which ultimately end up strengthening the cycle. Bingeing and purging can be rewarding on a number of levels. On the one hand, these symptoms relieve anxiety, boredom, emptiness, and other negative feelings; on the other hands, they prevent stressful interactions with other people (e.g. staying home from school or work to binge), attract attention from family and friends, and may provide a way to communicate one's ill-defined psychological distress in concrete terms. Over time, the behavioral sequence of bingeing and purging becomes more automatic and less emotionally intense, but also harder to interrupt.”
― Marco del Giudice, Evolutionary Psychopathology: A Unified Approach

“The self-starvation cycle has been documented across time and cultures, including non-Western ones. In modern Western societies, concerns with fat and thinness are the main reason for weight loss and probably explain the moderate rise of Anorexia Nervosa incidence across the second half of the 20th century. However, cases of self-starvation with spiritual and religious motivations have been common in Europe at least since the Middle Ages (and include several Catholic saints, most famously St. Catherine of Siena). In some Asian cultures, digestive discomfort is often cited as the initial reason for restricting food intake, but the resulting syndrome has essentially the same symptoms as anorexia in Western countries.”
― Marco del Giudice, Evolutionary Psychopathology: A Unified Approach

“Runaway competition for thinness generates an evolutionary mismatch, which drives up the risk of maladaptive eating symptoms; in particular Abed suggested that AN arises as a direct consequence of competition for thinness, whereas BN may stem from attempts to maintaina nubile body shape.”
― Marco del Giudice, Evolutionary Psychopathology: A Unified Approach

“Runaway competition for thinness generates an evolutionary mismatch, which drives up the risk of maladaptive eating symptoms; in particular Abed suggested that AN arises as a direct consequence of competition for thinness, whereas BN may stem from attempts to maintain a nubile body shape.”
― Marco del Giudice, Evolutionary Psychopathology: A Unified Approach

“The pubertal surge of sex hormones plays a major role in the onset of eating symptoms in females, as shown by the fact that the heritability of Eating Disorders increases sharply at mid-puberty in girls, but not in boys. In particular, binge eating is strongly modulated by the interaction of estrogens and progesterone acrosss the menstrual cycle, consistent with the role played by these hormones in the regulation of hunger and feeding. Both the frequency of bingeing and its heritability peak after ovulation, in tandem with rising progesterone levels.”
― Marco del Giudice, Evolutionary Psychopathology: A Unified Approach

“When an organism can react in a protective way for little cost but potentially huge benefit (e.g. avoiding death), the optimal system expresses many false alarms. Vomiting may only cost only a few hundred calories and a few minutes, whereas not vomiting risks death from poisoning.”
― Riadh Abed, Evolutionary Psychiatry: Current Perspectives on Evolution and Mental Health

“The epidemiological evidence for sexual dimorphism in humans is extensive. Sexual dimorphism in body composition is already evident in infancy: males tend to be heavier than females at birth and have longer bodies and larger head circumferences. By early adulthood, sexual dimorphism in fat distribution is highly evident.
These are the evolutionary roots of male sensitivity to visual cues of female physical attractiveness and also of women's motivation to display, preserve and improve their physical attractiveness and thus increase their perceived mate value. The extreme end of this adaptation gives rise to the risk of EDs in the modern environment.”
― Riadh Abed, Evolutionary Psychiatry: Current Perspectives on Evolution and Mental Health

“To understand mismatch, we should note that yhe human lineage lived for 99% of its evolutionary history in relatively small, mobile, foraging, kin-based groups. It is under these conditions that human psychological mechanisms were shaped by selection. The seeds for mismatch were sown with the advent of agriculture, which resulted in permanently settled living around 10,000 - 20,000 years ago, and this radically altered the human physical and social environment with major implications for eating disorders EDs.”
― Riadh Abed, Evolutionary Psychiatry: Current Perspectives on Evolution and Mental Health

“To understand mismatch, we should note that the human lineage lived for 99% of its evolutionary history in relatively small, mobile, foraging, kin-based groups. It is under these conditions that human psychological mechanisms were shaped by selection. The seeds for mismatch were sown with the advent of agriculture, which resulted in permanently settled living around 10,000 - 20,000 years ago, and this radically altered the human physical and social environment with major implications for eating disorders EDs.”
― Riadh Abed, Evolutionary Psychiatry: Current Perspectives on Evolution and Mental Health

“The Sexual Competition Hypothesis is based on the fact that throughout human evolutionary history the female shape has been a reliable indicator of the female's reproductive history and reproductive potential. The same is not true for men, where physical appearance, while relevant, is much less useful in assessing a man's reproductive potential. The visual signal for a female's peak reproductive potential in ancestral environments was the female's nubile shape, which was generally short-lived and declined with the repeated cycles of gestation and lactation.”
― Riadh Abed, Evolutionary Psychiatry: Current Perspectives on Evolution and Mental Health

“Female reproductive life history is linked to cardiovascular, metabolic, inflammatory and endocrine alterations to physiology in ways that have not only short-term but also long-term and, in some cases, permanent effects.”
― Riadh Abed, Evolutionary Psychiatry: Current Perspectives on Evolution and Mental Health

“Un escalofrío recorre mi espina dorsal cuando dos alas gigantes, como las de un ángel, que superan el tamaño del espejo, parecen unidas a mi cuerpo.”
― Andrea Rivera Carrillo, Estaciones

“El vacío que dejaba en mi alma no era siquiera semejante al vacío de mi cuerpo, después de más de un mes sin comer. El dolor en mi pecho no se acercaba en lo absoluto al dolor que había sentido al estar desplomada y sola en el piso gélido del baño, después de haber vomitado. Y por más que amara el ballet, este no llenaría jamás las ausencias que poco a poco se iban acumulando en mi vida.”
― Andrea Rivera Carrillo, La calma del no ser

“The main evolutionary explanation for the obesity epidemic is obvious; the mechanism that regulate body weight are poorly suited for our modern environments. Taking your body into a modern grocery store is like taking your computed into the summer sun. The environment is outside the range that the control mechanisms can cope with. Our environment is so different from the one we evolved in that it’s remarkable that anyone eats normally. Our hunter-gatherer ancestors walked miles each day gathering food and hunting game, eager to satisfy hunger with whatever they could find. The food they found was mainly high-fiber fruits and vegetables and lean fish and meat. That was only a few thousand years ago, less for many populations.”
― Randolph M. Nesse, Good Reasons for Bad Feelings: Insights from the Frontier of Evolutionary Psychiatry