to think focusing on the media is missing the point?

[crashdoll]

I won't link to it directly but briefly summarise the daily mail story of a 20 year old young lady who has recovered from anorexia. She's campaigning to bain airbrushed photos of women in magazines. This led me to think about an awful lot of articles I've read about eating disorders in the media and there is often a focus on how skinny women in the public eye are poor role models. Now, I'm not for one second disagreeing that women and their portrayal in the media does not lead to young women, in particular, having skewed body image ideas. However, anorexia nervosa is a complicated mental illness and I feel that while the media plays a role in how girls feel about their bodies, it does not have such a big role in the mental illness.

I spent my teenage years suffering with anorexia, in and out of hospital. Unfortunately, my younger sister also developed the same eating disorder and still suffers. While I think attitudes towards eating disorders are improving, there is still a lot of "silly, spoilt girl with a first world problem who just wants attention and to be a supermodel". I feel the way the media blames skinny women on TV in articles about anorexia just perpetuates these ideas.

So, AIBU?

Novack - you know Jane Austen was being ironic, right?

I agree with bochead
Many of the young women I work with are on a "diet"
this seems to involve constantly talking about what they can or carnt eat then having a "eat all i can nites" every few days
It never seems to be a real, permanent change to a healthy lifestyle with exercise and well balanced meals
I DO think the media has a lot of influence, as they all follow celebrity magazines, etc...
I can see how these ideas can turn into the mh disorders such as anorexia

Also very that all children age 4 need weighing
My 7 year old came home from "healthy eating day" convinced that her one yogurt per day was somehow unhealthy

@Novack. Re. the "unhealthy" weight of Polynesian women. I had understood - forgive me if I'm wrong - that one of the many problems with the standards of "healthy" weight is that the studies on which they were based involved mostly Caucasian individuals, and we therefore have little idea whether they are valid for other ethnicities. I think it would be very surprising if the healthy range of weight for women of West African origin (who typically have heavy builds and curvy shapes) were the same as the healthy range for women of Japanese origin (slight builds and much less curvy) and at the moment I think we're blindly applying data for women of European origin to everyone.

I wouldn't really expect to see the same health problems in someone who because of their genetic make-up tended to a hefty build and someone who was naturally slight but had a huge belly because of eating too much - though I'm not an expert. BMI or weighing won't be able to distnguish these two cases (though other measurements will).

Africa has too many other causes and factors I suppose to make a study easy to monitor. For example Maasai who have historically had sufficient access to protein milk etc. rarely are seen to be fat and yet 50% will die before 60 years and most wont live much beyond that. West african average expectancy is in the 40's with so many causes it must be nigh on impossible to study that in situ. Perhaps there are studies from the USA or Brazil which both had large african immigration are available.

An average Japanese has a traditionally good diet with a high standard of living and one of the highest life expectancies of the world in the 80-90 years range. However a summo wrestler does not.

Some people do use the phrase 'big boned' but that is just a common myth whereas the average adult skeleton is somewhere around 20-25 lbs which lets face it even with we gave another 5lbs for a big boned myth is not anything like the extra weight hefty/obese people are carrying.