Why I'm Scared For Future Generations

The topic of eating behaviors and attitudes is something that is close to my heart. When I was nine, I started to feel pressure to look like the actresses who played the characters on the popular Disney shows that I watched on television. I had not even hit puberty yet, but already I was feeling self-conscious about my body, the body of a young girl. A child’s focus should not be on if she is thin enough, it should be on learning and growing. Luckily, my close relationship with my parents allowed me to express my feelings, and we worked through them. I stopped watching shows that made me overly examine my body, and I steered my focus toward other things.

I encountered these same insecurities in my peers all through middle and high school. I would be guilt tripped for being naturally small, and watched as girls in my grade dieted and picked apart their bodies. It was my freshman year of college when one of my best friend’s from home called me and told me that she had not eaten anything in three days in an attempt to lose weight. When I heard this, I broke down crying- for her, and for the society we live in that makes young women feel that they must be thin in order to feel beautiful, accepted, and worthy.

The article “Eating behaviors and attitudes following prolonged exposure to television among ethnic Fijian adolescent girls” by Becker et al. resonated with me because it shows how strongly cultural expectations influence the self-image that young women have of themselves. Before the young women in Fiji were exposed to Western media, they had very low rates of eating disorders because weight loss, dieting, and exercising to lose weight are culturally discouraged. Before the research took place, dieting was rare within Fiji. After the survey, 69% of respondents said that at some point they had dieted to lose weight and that they felt that their bodies were not thin enough. “Specific cultural forces, such as exposure to Western media imagery, may promote transformation in body aesthetic ideals that stimulate eating disordered behavior” (Becker et al, 512). Of the respondents who took part in the research, 77% said that television had influenced how they felt about their body. With the introduction of Western media came the rise of eating disorders, as girls tried to emulate the characters that they admired.

The research reported on in this article shows how much of an influence cultural ideals of thinness have on disordered eating and body image. In a country where weight loss was discouraged, all it took was the exposure to Western television to make participants in the survey want to lose weight and go to extreme measures to do so, like self-induced vomiting. The cultural ideals of the previous generations were overthrown by the exposure to media that portrayed and idealized thinness.

What this article implies is that media has enough of an influence on young women that even when their cultural values tell them that they should not try to reshape their bodies, they do anyway. This is even more terrifying for girls in other countries such as the U.S. who are bombarded everyday with messages not just from media but from their friends, family members, and even doctors that they should not be the least bit overweight. The ideal of thinness is even taught in schools, where in middle and high school gym classes students are forced to measure their BMI in front of their peers, hoping that theirs will be the lowest and praying that they do not have the highest BMI in the group for fear of being “the fat one.” It would not surprise me if in the future rates of disordered eating become even higher, as people become increasingly dependent on social media that is with them at all times, constantly advertising the latest dieting trend or weight loss program.

The influence that media has on disordered eating terrifies me. Not just for my friends and the people in my generation, but for the generations that have yet to be born and who will come into a society where they are told that there is only one way to look, and that is thin. The study done in Fiji shows the extreme influence that thin idealized media has on young women, and the results are gut wrenching. Unless the world wants the majority of its female inhabitants engaging in risky weight loss behavior, changes need to happen soon.