Research for decades shows that the media images about body shape and size have an enormous influence on how we see ourselves and the world. The changing landscape of those images affects how people, especially young people, track self-image and self-worth.
This truth started with the creation of mass media in the 1960’s in national magazines. Media evolution exploded decade after decade and now has a much wider and relentless scope in social media. The juxtaposition of media-influenced expectations about how a person should look with our own photos and selfies creates an only too obvious descent into obsessive focus on body.
Right now, the shift from body positivity a few years ago when people saw images of a wider variety of shapes back to extreme thinness at the current moment is complete. The result is a reversal of any attempt to broaden cultural expectations and accept what our bodies actually look like. Now only thin is in, and extreme thinness is in as well.
I have written many times in this blog that dieting is the number one risk factor for developing an eating disorder. Most people who restrict food won’t be able to do so for long before hunger takes over and makes them eat. For people genetically and environmentally predisposed, restriction of food appears to trigger a metabolic and psychological switch that starts the process of developing an eating disorder.
The more prevalent the drive for thinness, the more likely people will diet and the more people will develop eating disorders.
In addition, people with eating disorders feel more vindicated to fight to be as thin as possible and feel validated to follow the eating disordered thoughts in a media environment such as we have now. People who are in the middle of eating disorder recovery have a hard time struggling to maintain the daily effort of getting well and often abandon the process to refocus in weight loss at all cost. Even when they do come back to recovery, they start back in the original hole again.
It’s hard as a clinician to push back against that current. No words of encouragement in therapy match the scope of the cultural trend towards thinness. The result is watching a lot of people become more entrenched in their eating disorder again. Treatment turns to working to prevent the most serious consequences of a slip and preparing to be supportive and encouraging when the eating disorder gets a lot worse.
It’s demoralizing but also natural in the fight not just against eating disorders but against the cultural forces which cause these illnesses in the first place.
As long as we as a society glorify thinness, eating disorders, sadly, are here to stay.
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