Want to feel better about your body? Stop reading fashion magazines.
It’s the holidays. Magazines focus on our waistlines and ways to survive the season while keeping a slender figure. I’m all for good health, but we’re frequently sold an image, product or diet that does not always result in good mental or physical health, particularly for women.
What’s your ideal weight? In one alarming study, adolescent girls described their ideal girl as 5 feet 7 inches tall and weighing a mere 100 pounds.
This ideal is — at best — unhealthy and, for many, anorexic.
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Considering how important IT is to our culture, please do not forget to include how the photoshop feature is utilized in print. And about the magic of CGI (Computer-generated imagery)is used in the media. Even the biggest celebrity or model has an entourage of people to keep up their pubic image. Not to mention, a really good art director. Nothing goes to press in fashion books without the talent and the talent’s talent approval.
What our young women must understand is what they are seeing / looking at is NOT real. It is about art. It is about subliminal seduction. It is about ad revenue.
Magaines do not make me feel fat. I’m a 33 year old woman.
They do make me feel extremely ugly and unable to attain what is considered beautiful. I am fat, (BMI of 29,) but I know that’s something I can change by proper diet, exercise, etc. etc.
My body image goes way beyond “fat.” I have extremely low self-esteem. My face, my hair, my arms and legs, my stomach area (not the fat, but the flap that I gained from 2 c-sections, that doesn’t seem to ever snap back or tone up.) but, primarily my face. I don’t see just ugly, I see laughable, gross, and hideous. It is so bad, that my brain has created an alternate me and how I look in my brain, so that when I look in the mirror, I’m startled by the person there.
It’s not just magazines, but t.v. movies, walking down the street. I despise the “media pretty” world. I never feel good enough to be out in public. I live with worry that my husband will find someone more attractive and go with them, like one day he will wake up and realize that he’s better looking than me and so why be with me? (He has bad self-esteem too, for his looks.)
So, it’s far more than just feeling fat. The fact that if you’re not one of them, you won’t be on t.v. or in a magazine unless it’s to be a joke is what drives it. Look at Susan Boyle. When she stepped on the stage for the first time and said, “I’m a siger,” everyone laughed. That’s the world we live in.
I wholeheartedly agree. In my work with eating-disordered clients (and other clients who express dissatisfaction related to self-appearance), I generally recommend that they stop reading fashion magazines or other magazines depicting “ideal” bodies or weight loss tips. After a few weeks, many of my clients expressed a sense of “relief” about the reduction in daily messages and images that trigger insecurities about their own bodies or weight. It is a simple therapy technique that generally produces positive results and I highly recommend it.
Thank you for focusing on this issue.
It is definitely not only about fat, but about being bombarded with impossible images of “beautiful” people, wearing the best clothes of the moment, having entire lifestyles that, that mere mortals cannot compete with. Going cold turkey on the fashion mags – and a lot of internet content – and many TV shows – is probably a good 1st step. I am rather fond of some British TV shows because they- for some reason – often use actors who look more like real people. [Compare Eastenders to American soap operas, for instance]
Tangent: a fashion show that I have been fascinated with – What Not to Wear – emphasizes clothing and appearance,on the one hand, but also uses real people with normal “figure flaws” and concurrent self esteem issues, and pushes them to see themselves as they are and to respect their own real appearance in a way that seems to be pretty healthy. It does push the material and cosmetic; but also acknowledges the achievements of the individuals – and how our own self views are affected by the responses of people around us to what we project. As I said, another topic…