Informative Speech On Anorexia

Essay by PaperNerd ContributorCollege, Undergraduate November 2001

download word file, 4 pages 0.0

TOPIC: Anorexic ORGANIZATION PATTERN: Topical GENERAL PURPOSE: Inform SPECIFIC PURPOSE: To Inform the audience of anorexic disease THESIS STATEMENT: Anorexia is an extremely serious disease that strikes a large number of Americans.

INTRODUCTION I was Julie's best friend. I watched her grow from a little girl who doted on by her parents into a tomboy who carried frogs in her pockets. I watched her become a young woman, fussing with her hair and trying on every outfit in her closet before her first date. I always wanted to be like her.

But then something went terribly wrong. Julie's shiny hair became dull and brittle. Her eyes lost their sparkle, and she didn't smile that brilliant smile anymore. I watched now, as she stepped onto the scale seven times a day, wore baggy clothes to cover her shriveled frame, and kept muttering about losing those last two stubborn pounds. Julie had become anorexic.

One in every 100 teenage females in American suffers from anorexia, and the New York Times says this number is rising by 5 percent every year. Although this disease does strike men, says the Times, 90 percent of its victims are women, and 44 percent of those victims are college-age females.

From my research and my personal experience with Julie, I have discovered that anorexia is an extremely serious disease that strikes a large number of Americans. Today I will tell you what anorexia is, what causes it, and what methods are used to treat it.

BODY I. Let's start by examining what anorexia is.

A. Anorexia nervosa, one of a number of eating disorders, is a disorder of self-starvation. Simply put, a person who is anorexic refuses to eat normal amounts of food.

1. An article in Maclean's states that there are four characteristics of all...