#3 Body Image and Self-Esteem
We are living in an era when Body-image and identity are more interwoven than ever before. Young girls call themselves fat without having any clue as to what fat means. They hear the word and somehow know that it isn’t good and that they don’t want to be it. They scrutinize themselves in the mirror criticizing their natural features that in previous years would have been both acceptable and beautiful.
Increasingly, boys are coming under the influence of a thin and fit obsessed culture, manifesting in a significant increase in male eating disorders. As has been well described by Darryl Roberts in his recent documentary, America the Beautiful, males are being taught to be dissatisfied with real girls and real adult women & are taught to want someone sexier, thinner…you name it – someone better and different from the real person they are, actually, in relationship with.
We are all affected by the media’s mass marketing campaigns to purposefully promote feelings of insecurity and self-hate, encouraging us to turn our bodies into civil war zones in order to boost economic profits. No one is immune to the ever-changing cultural beauty standards and the pressures that accompany them. Rather than a path to greater self-esteem, what we are really being sold is a sense of inadequacy and defeat. We can never achieve these manipulated looks, yet it is suggested that we can, & we buy in to it.
Despite the facts, (that 5 % of people actually maintain weight loss from diet programs rather than healthy eating patterns) many of us fall under their spell and argue in favor of dieting – saying that it is healthy and good, even something to be admired and rewarded, a virtue worth pursuing. In this winter season when we are inundated with diet ads, be cautious and skeptical.