What about our society leads to such a high incidence of eating disorders? With such a plentiful supply of food, shouldn’t we spend more time focusing on other things? How can diet and weight still be so integral to self-esteem in the modern age?
These questions are the tip of the iceberg in the social experiment of hyper-focusing on body and weight in our culture. At a time when there could be space to focus on so many other, more important parts of life, it’s curious and confounding why food and weight consume so many people’s lives.
Some causes for the decades-long epidemic of eating disorders are clear. Thinness continues to be prized as a sign of wealth, success, health and control. Fat phobia is pervasive, and the combination of social media and the GLP-1 medications reinforce the urgency to be thin.
Persistent messaging from the food industry, the growing wellness voices and the medical establishment promote a specific diet (which changes regularly according to the latest fad) and weight management as the ultimate signs of health. Even though the medical data is slim, industry promotes a clear idea that thinness equates with health, and the masses follow blindly without questioning the data or the intent.
Social isolation in our homes, blinded by our addiction to phones and the constant queuing of content, leaves so many of us bereft of meaning, a void easily filled by the lure of dieting and weight loss.
The social pressures that lead to an unending number of eating disorders is even more insidious. Social media limits the idea of what success looks like. Young people, no matter where they live, see the same media with the same images dictating the their body is an integral part of success in their future.
The most important part of this experience is the manufactured images of young people who promote thinness and unreasonable diets as a sign of a good life. With the sense that there are fewer opportunities in their future, limited ideas of what constitutes success and relentless images, a life consumed by dieting and body obsessions is the norm.
As I have written in this blog many times, dieting is the number one risk factor for developing an eating disorder. The daily lives of young people set them up to consider dieting virtuous and almost a given in life, hence the constant stream of people with eating disorders.
Once these patterns of eating and of focusing on food and body develop, most people struggle to escape this way of life. Condemning young people to build an identity in the context of body and food thoughts already leaves them at the mercy of an obsessive wave of thoughts that our minds struggle to escape. Many of these people will develop eating disorders. Most of the rest will remain mired in disordered eating and body image concerns for years to come.
Our society needs to value humanity over thinness and diet in order to escape the cycle of eating disorders. Life remains empty and hollow when food and weight represent the most life can offer. The voices which can broadcast what actually does matter in life need to be heard for us to finally see a downturn in eating disorders.
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