The Role of Mass Media in Self-Worth

The first and possibly most important step to avoid the pitfalls of how food and body play an outsized role in modern life is actually not related to food. Instead, we all need to focus on the elements of who we are and what we value in order to put food and weight in their proper place.

In many ways, food and body are defaults to represent self-worth and life priorities. There is an abundance of evidence to show that dieting, body focus and eating disorders arose in large part due to the inception of mass marketing. Only through the creative but insidious generation of images that pervaded our culture did these issues emerge. As media continues to grow and spread into every facet of our lives, we all struggle not to embrace food and weight as imperatives for a meaningful life.

I don’t mean to imply that food and weight haven’t had their place throughout human history, but media allows messages and images to spread much more widely and powerfully than ever before, and, as social beings, we are not wired to ignore the messages.

The only way to push back against the powerful societal messages is an active, directed approach. We need to spend time thinking about, considering and engaging with values and morals that are most important to us. We need to make decisions about how we want to eat for our own well being whether it’s based on how we feel, what we enjoy or the role food plays on our lives.

We need to embrace images of all sorts of bodies to counter the pervasive messages around thinness. We need to see the positive in our physical selves, our bodies and our appearance. We need to look for messages from people who think about and view bodies as beautiful in all shapes and sizes.

If we are passive about how we consider ourselves as humans, we remain very susceptible to the idea that our self-worth is based solely on food and body. But we also are very adaptable so making time to create our own sense of selves and our own thoughts about food and body that can counter the effects media has on each and every one of us.

Eating in the Era of Bounty and Thinness

Hunger and fullness cues used to be dictated by accessible resources and life demands. These cues were necessary to function in the world. With access to unlimited food and societal pressures around food and body, many other judgments affect what and when we eat.

Recent decades ushered in an era of plentiful food, more than anyone could have imagined, at least in the richer countries of the world. The food industry brought about a transformation in accessible foods from the transportation of fresh foods, a plethora of frozen foods and access to prepared foods. For those people privileged enough to have money and access, the abundance of food is extraordinary.

In addition, many jobs changed from manual labor to sedentary work in the past few generations. Without regular physical activity at work, people are able to rest and choose what and how they eat each and every day.

Our bodies, however, developed a metabolism to survive very different settings. We feel hunger much more acutely than fullness and expect to exist mostly in need of food, not around an endless bounty.

As a result, we spend an enormous amount of time thinking about what to eat, when to eat it and how we are supposed to eat. Combine these circumstances with the societal values about body weight and size and it’s a wonder we are able to do anything other than obsess about food and weight.

Honestly, many people, even those without eating disorders, do spend much of their mental energy on food and weight.

The incidence of eating disorders has skyrocketed under these circumstances. The lockdown during the pandemic revealed that with more empty time in our lives, eating disorders continue to rise.

The situation that led to so much focus on food and accordingly eating disorders isn’t about to change. And the way our metabolism functions won’t change either. We are left with a simple question: how to manage hunger and food in this world?

I’m going to use the next few posts to address this question.