Newsweek:
The war on fat is bad news for people fighting eating disorders.
July 24 (2003) — “I’m sooo fat!”
How many times have you looked in the mirror and said those words? Living in the United States, we sometimes find it hard not to feel that way. We are constantly bombarded with images of rail-thin supermodels and flooded with advertisements for diets and weight-loss pills. And right now the news is focused on how many Americans, including children, are obese.
ACCORDING TO THE CENTERS for Disease Control and Prevention, 64 percent of American adults are obese or overweight. The percentage of overweight children and adolescents has tripled since 1980, with 13 percent now considered seriously overweight.
These troubling statistics spawned scores of articles on the dangers of obesity and the merits of losing weight. But is weight loss at any cost the right message to be sending? Dr. Dina Zeckhausen worries that it may be a recipe for disaster.
Zeckhausen is an Atlanta-based psychologist who specializes in eating disorders. She says she’s not seeing an epidemic of obesity. Instead, she’s seeing a lot of girls, and more and more boys, who say they feel fat.
“Our waiting room looks like a modeling agency,” says Zeckhausen. “Here are all these gorgeous girls who think they’re fat and ugly. I know they’re fraught with insecurities. I see how beautiful they are, and they don’t know it. It’s so sad.”
According to the Eating Disorders Information Network, which Zeckhausen helped found, about 60 percent of high-school seniors are dieting. An obsession with thinness is not confined to teens. About 20 to 30 percent of normal-weight fourth graders think they’re fat, too.
An estimated 5 million to 10 million women, and about 1 million men, suffer from eating disorders such as bulimia (binging and purging) and anorexia (refusing to eat enough to maintain a healthy weight). It’s no wonder Zeckhausen sees this as an epidemic. And it’s one that she expects will grow with the current war on fat. Already, the U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA) reports that teenagers have the least nutritious eating habits of any age group in the United States. A mere 0.6 percent of teen girls meet the nutrition guidelines suggested in the USDA’s Food Guide Pyramid. To lose weight, teens are cutting out carbohydrates or fat, two essential parts of a healthy diet. Or they’re yo-yo dieting-depriving themselves of food and then gorging as a reward.
None of these behaviors is healthy, but the message that fat is bad and thin is good seems to be the only one that’s getting through. And that message is delivered in hundreds of ways on a daily basis.
While working on her second book, See Jane Win for Girls, psychologist Sylvia Rimm interviewed dozens of adolescents. Perhaps not surprisingly, she found that peer pressure was their number-one concern. What was of particular interest to Rimm, however, was that much of the pressure teens were feeling had to do with how they looked.
“I think there has always been peer pressure, but it’s much more appearance-oriented,” says Rimm. “I think that’s a direct impact of the media. The message to be sexual and very, very thin is really a powerful message. To fit the in-crowds in school, you have to dress like the people on television.”
The trouble is, of course, that in real life very few people look like the actors and models that so many teens want to emulate. Even supermodels don’t look as good as their photographs suggest.
“These images in the media are not real, and not healthy,” says Zeckhausen. “Only about 1 percent of the people really look that way. The models they’re looking at are not only airbrushed and computer-enhanced-virtually unattainable images-even the models don’t look this way. And a lot of the models are doing really bad things to look this way.”
Still, many teens persist in trying to look like the models they see in magazines.
“They want the attention and the affirmation that gets given to models,” says Audrey D. Brashich, who was a model as a teenager.
But Brashich says she found even being on the cover of Seventeen magazine didn’t bring her the kind of popularity or self-esteem she’d hoped for. Today, Brashich runs a Web site with the aim of helping teenagers see that who they are is more important than how they look.
“My primary goal is to get girls to start thinking about which women are celebrated in our culture and why. And to start asking why it’s models, and not a doctor or a mother,” Brashich says.
Zeckhausen thinks those kinds of questions are a good place to start.
“It’s about what we value in our culture. Why are we putting so much emphasis on the outside these days?” says Zeckhausen. “What about developing yourself on the inside and expanding our notions of what’s beautiful?”
Actress and author Jessica Weiner has made it her business to redefine beauty as something that comes from within.
Weiner, who always wanted to be an actress, went to a high school for the performing arts. After she auditioned for a play, one of her teachers pulled her aside. She was, he told her, a wonderfully talented actress, but she was just not thin enough to be a leading lady.
Weiner, then a healthy size 9, had never been happy with her curvy shape. She wanted to be thin like her friend the ballet dancer, who threw up after every meal.
Weiner recognized that being bulimic—binge eating, then throwing up—was unhealthy. So instead she went on a very restrictive diet, living on only baked chicken and salad. To some, that might seem healthy. But eating disorders, like the people who suffer from them, come in all shapes and sizes. They are perhaps best defined as an unhealthy obsession with food.
Food defined Weiner’s life. Thoughts about what she was eating—and not eating—occupied her every waking moment. When Weiner deprived herself of food, she saw it as a victory of willpower to be praised, not a symptom of an eating disorder to be treated. Food became the enemy.
“I would look at my life and say, It will be so much better when I lose five pounds,” says Weiner. “Everything was on the outside.”
Eventually Weiner recognized she had a problem, and she sought help. Now she seeks to help others.
In her book A Very Hungry Girl: How I Filled Up on Life and How You Can, Too, scheduled for release in September, she chronicles her story. Weiner also shares the many stories she’s heard from others while touring schools around the country and performing in plays on social issues such as eating disorders.
“There are so many young people I come into contact with who are so paralyzed by their fear of fat that they’re not living their young life to the fullest,” says Weiner.
The alternative to feeling empty inside, both emotionally and physically, says Weiner, is to fill up on life. That’s easy to say, but it’s something Weiner says she has learned to do.
The most important thing, she says, is to shift your focus from the external to the internal. Compliment people on who they are instead of how they look. Pursue your passions, develop your skills, and follow your own muse. Feel good about yourself because you mastered a difficult piece of music or played well in a soccer game, not because the scale showed you were two pounds lighter.
Weiner found that her biggest reward came from finding a way to be of service. She shares her story in hopes that it will help others. “It’s amazing we feel so alone with this topic,” says Weiner, “but we’re not.”
For more information about eating disorders, go to the Eating Disorder Information Network Web site at www.edin-ga.org
For more information on healthy eating and proper nutrition, go to the American Dietetic Association Web site at www.eatright.org
Contact Jessica Weiner at www.jessicaweiner.com
Contact Audrey Brashich at www.cultureofmodeling.com |
