What are eating disorders? According to the National Eating Disorders Association (2010), eating disorders “include extreme emotions, attitudes, and behaviors surrounding weight and food issues”.
According to the American research group, Anorexia Nervosa & Related Eating Disorders, Inc., one out of every four college-aged women uses unhealthy methods of weight control – including fasting, skipping meals, excessive exercise, laxative abuse, and self-induced vomiting.
The pressure to be thin is also affecting young girls: the Canadian Women's Health Network warns that weight control measures are now being taken by girls as young as 5 and 6. American statistics are similar. Several studies, such as one conducted by Marika Tiggemann and Levina Clark in 2006 titled “Appearance Culture in Nine- to 12-Year-Old Girls: Media and Peer Influences on Body Dissatisfaction,” indicate that nearly half of all preadolescent girls wish to be thinner, and as a result have engaged in a diet, or are aware of the concept of dieting.
The media most certainly contributes to dieting. The media encourages size discrimination. The media, while not exactly the main cause of the development of eating disorders, does however promote the obsession of being thin … and as a result, affecting body image and indirectly affects the growth of these sickness.
Famous film and television actresses are becoming younger, taller, and thinner. Everywhere you turn, you are inevitably bombarded by images of thin, sexy models – on the cover of magazines, in music videos, on print advertisements for major clothing brands. The images on the television and on the big screen spend countless hours and tons of money brainwashing us into being thin and beautiful, and losing weight in order for people to like us better.
Celebrities are no less susceptible to eating disorders than the rest of the population. For example, Mary-Kate Olsen, Linday Lohan, Nicole Richie.
Diet advertisements on television, in magazines and newspapers, everywhere continually drill the message that losing weight will make us happier into its audience.
Women’s magazines are full of articles urging that if they can just lose those last twenty pounds, they’ll have it all – the perfect marriage, loving children, happy family and a rewarding career.
The underlying message in all this is; we are consistently given the message that we are just not good-looking enough, pretty enough or thin enough.
The media certainly has an important role to play in the messages impressionable, young people receive about the cultural ideal of physical perfection. The media and body image have long been dependent upon each other to set styles and trends. For years, society has let the media set the standards on how men, and particularly women, are supposed to look in order to be attractive.
Encouraging the media to present more diverse and real images of people with more positive messages about health and self-esteem may not eliminate eating disorders entirely, but it would help reduce the pressures many people feel to make their bodies conform to one ideal, and in the process, reduce feelings of body dissatisfaction.
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