Eating disorders do not allow you to love your body


Normally, a teen's body changes in size, shape, structure, and chemistry. A girl shoots up. She rounds out, spreads, and softens. These physical changes do not occur all at once: her legs lengthen faster than her torso, her feet sooner than her arms, and she looks gangly, awkward. Her body begins to behave erratically.

Hormones are surging in her system. She is experiencing streams of estrogen, adding fat cells to hips, thighs, and breasts. Spurts of progesterone cramp her abdomen and blotch her face with pimples. She feels batted about by these currents of biochemistry and can't help but become preoccupied with all the ways her body is changing. Preoccupation is normal. In fact, an adolescent girl can use it to her advantage. If she can accept her physical self as a gift and create her own ideal for herself, she will reach adulthood having redefined physical beauty on her own terms.

But some girls - in fact, most - tilt preoccupation to the negative. "With early adolescence, girls surrender their relaxed attitudes about their bodies and take up the burden of self-criticism," writes Pipher. Girls of this age hear external criticism and make it internal. They own it and become it and, feeling bad, try to unload it. They live in a world where accepting their physical selves is nearly impossible. Fashion magazines and music videos often dismember women's bodies with close-ups of a specific part. A $40 billion diet industry and an exploding $9.4 billion plastic surgery business send out the message: Your body is flawed as it is. But you can achieve perfection. In fact, you must.

"The increasing pressure to be thin and the unrealistic images portrayed in the mass media may have a devastating effect on women's self-perceptions, self-esteem, and identity development," writes researcher Sherry Turner in a paper demonstrating that viewing the covers of fashion magazines for a mere thirteen minutes can significantly lower a girl's self-esteem.

Indeed, eating disorders experts are quick to cite how culture has slimmed down the beauty ideal. From the 1960s on, for example, the average weight of a Playboy centerfold and a Miss America Pageant contestant has dropped steadily, compared to the weight of average American women, who are getting heavier. By 1988, nearly three-fourths of Playboy models and two-thirds of Miss America contestants weighed 15 percent below their expected weight for age and height.

Fifteen percent. That is the boundary between subthreshold and true anorexia nervosa. What this means is that women in their twenties and thirties today came of age with anorexic models as their ideal of beauty. The impact cannot be overstated. Just as impressionable girls are becoming rounder, the culture is telling them that their budding physical selves are all wrong. Girls learn that they are supposed to be flatter, skinnier. They react, not surprisingly, through their physical selves.

Recent news stories now decry the emaciated state of today's top fashion runway models. Still, an estimated 42 percent of elementary school students between first and third grades want to be thinner. And 81 percent of 10-year-olds are afraid of being fat. Girls feel the effects more than boys. Even underweight girls think they are overweight, and thus hate their bodies. And body dissatisfaction has gone global, plaguing girls in Great Britain, Australia, New Zealand, Brazil, Israel, Japan, Sweden, Croatia, Mexico, Fiji, China - even in the most rural and deprived parts of South Africa.

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This article was sent to us by: Meredith Bronsten at 09122010

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