Food for Thought: Eating Disorders Awareness
“Body Image and the Media: Worshipping Illusions”
Dr. LaNae
Valentine
The following is a transcript to a presentation given at
Let’s define what body image is and why that is important to our discussion today. Body image is fundamental to our sense of who we are. For most of us the body is the very core of our psychological identity and for some individuals, a large portion of their self-concept is based upon body image. Body image is the picture of our own body which we form in our minds—it’s how we view ourselves. It’s not necessarily totally accurate all the time. It thus relates to all other images and attitudes we hold about ourselves, including our view of our personality, attitude, and our being as a whole. So in that way body image is very important.
Negative body thoughts can affect behavior, relationships and self-esteem. Poor body image is associated with low levels of self-perceived physical attractiveness, self-acceptance, social self-confidence, popularity with the opposite sex, assertiveness and athletic ability. There have been research studies done that indicate that a negative body image affects all these aspects of our lives. Body image, particularly body image dissatisfaction, has been consistently linked with eating disorders and a number of studies have documented poor body image as a prominent risk factor for disordered eating.
Let’s talk about how we formulate a body image and the historical context that has evolved for women to define a body image. Historically women have been defined by their looks and bodies more than any other feature they possess. That helps us understand why it’s such an important issue for women. Women have always believed that they are in need of adjustment and that the female body is an object to be perfected. So I am just going to quickly go through some historical context. Every period of history has had its own standard of what is beautiful and what is not. During the Renaissance, well-born European women used to pluck out the hairs of their head or use poultices mixed with vinegar (mixed with cat dung of all things) which often removed their skin as well as their hair. But that’s the length they went to have this beautiful image.
During the Elizabethan age, many women, in search of skin
that looked like porcelain, whitened their faces using ceruse, a potentially
lethal combination of vinegar and lead, which in the end made their skin look
horrible. In central
During the 1890s, fatness was viewed as a sign of
energy. I’ve seen an ad for that time
period for foods that would help fatten you up and also an ad for inflatable
underwear that you could wear under your clothing so you could sort of inflate
it and have a bigger rear end or bigger shoulders and back which was considered
a good thing. The thin silhouette sought
today was considered sickly and a sign of a poor bet for a bride. The corsets of 19th century
squeezed the woman’s internal organs out of shape and sometimes broke her ribs,
but you know, that’s what women have to do to be beautiful. The voluptuous full-figure was an indication
of health and fertility. However, by the
1920s the Victorian hourglass gave way to the thin flapper who bound her
breasts to achieve the washboard profile that looked so good in
I hope that you’re getting the picture, the standard of beauty keeps shifting and changing and yet we women keep trying to mold ourselves into that standard. The 1960s saw the arrival of Twiggy. She weighed in at a shapeless 91 pounds. The 1970s and 1980s beauty ideal remained slim but required a more toned and fit look. And by the 1990s the ideal was very slim and large breasted, which is almost impossible to obtain for most women. And then we have the 2000s, the thin and sexy, expose the midriff kind of look. So, as you can the see the standard of beauty has shifted and changed, but there has always been some kind of a standard or an ideal to achieve. Since the rise of the mass media, TV, movies, magazines, we have become exposed to extremely uniform standards of beauty and fashion. So back in the Elizabethan era I might have been a peasant and I didn’t know you were supposed to have porcelain skim so I wasn’t bothered by it. But today, all of us are pretty much affected by this uniform standard of beauty and fashion.
The media has made us all much more conscience of how we look. And the way they do this, more than 130 billion dollars is spent on advertising annually. By high school graduation the average American teenager conservatively exposed to 300 to 500 ads per day will have been bombarded by at least as many as 350,000 commercials. So that is a lot of exposure to images and ideas about how we should look and how we should be. A study of 4,294 network television commercials revealed that 1 out of every 3.8 commercials sent some sort of an attractiveness message telling the viewers what is or is not attractive.
In all these commercials that we are exposed to, many of
them are telling us what attractiveness is and what it is not. The media presents a thinner than average
woman as the ideal, as least presently that’s what it is doing. Thinness is typically associated with status,
wealth and success for women. Over
three-quarters of the female characters in TV situation comedies are under
weight. Jennifer Ashton said in a Ladies
Home Journal interview, “It’s scary how
Here’s a quote by Michael Medved that I liked because sometimes we think that we are not really affected by these advertisements. We understand what they are doing and we see them but we really don’t see them. He said, “The leaders of the entertainment industry regularly downplay the significance of their own work insisting that the fantasies they have created have no influence on anyone. The networks and the studios have commissioned expensive studies from various experts to support their appallingly illogical contention that violence on screen has no connection to violence in real life and that intensely sexual material does nothing to encourage promiscuity. And yet, the same industry then turns around and asks advertisers to pay hundreds of thousands of dollars for 30 seconds of air time in the hope that this fleeting exposure will directly alter the public’s buying behavior.”
We know that the advertising does alter our buying behavior or they wouldn’t spend the kind of money that they do on advertising. And from some of the studies we have learned that 4 out of 5 children by the age of 10 years old are afraid of being fat. That’s what they report. So where is that coming from? The number one wish of teen girls is to be thin—if you were to ask them that. It might be nice if the number one wish would be to stop world hunger, or peace, or something a little more altruistic than being thin. Studies reveal that the most important thing a teen boy looks for in a date is attractiveness. Four out of five American women are dissatisfied with their appearance.
For my discussion presentation today, I came up with four illusions that I think we acquire from the media. The media isn’t simply a bunch of images that tell us how we should look, rather the media also informs us about how we should think and how we should feel. I’m sure there are many more illusions, however, for our discussion today, I’ve come up with four. The first illusion is “I Can Mold my Body into Something it is Not.” I call this the compulsion to control. Most advertising is directed at making us believe that we can mold our body size and shape, even our personalities, into sometime more, something better, brighter, thinner, prettier, younger, more fun-loving, more handsome. So, there is that belief that when we view the advertising that surely we can make ourselves into something more and better than we already are. Over three-fourths of the covers of women’s magazines include at least one message about how to change a women’s bodily appearance by diet, exercise or cosmetic surgery.
There are tons of ads out there about how to change our appearance. You’ve seen them, the fitness ads, “a seven-day body makeover.” Astounding ads. Make your shape work for you. And gee, if you run out of ideas here’s an article with 793 ideas about how to make yourself somehow more beautiful, more acceptable. There are all the diets ads about the foods we should and should not eat if we want to lose weight. If dieting doesn’t work there is always cosmetic surgery, plastic surgery. There is lots of advertising on cosmetic surgery if you haven’t noticed. We receive hundreds of messages that reinforce the illusion of control by reaching outside of ourselves for things that somehow we can have that happiness and approval and acceptance we desire if we reach outside of ourselves. Cosmetics, a new fitness program, new cars, new clothes, lure us to search for external pleasures and external validation.
And they are very smart because by presenting an ideal difficult to achieve and maintain, the cosmetic and diet product industries are assured of growth and profits. You know they just want to make money so they are going to present an ideal, make us feel inferior, make us feel lacking in some way so that we will buy their products and they are doing quite well. Each year Americans spend $40 billion for diet products, $20 billion for cosmetics, and $300 million for cosmetic surgery. In 1994—so this is a pretty old statistic—total retail sales for the American fashion and footwear industries were estimated at $246.5 billion. So we are spending a lot of money on these products to somehow better ourselves.
Women who look at advertisements showed signs of depression and were more dissatisfied with their bodies after only one to three minutes of viewing the pictures. So again, there is that sense of somehow I am lacking now that I see these images, somehow I am inferior. Psychological research shows that increased body awareness actually lowers self-esteem. So the more we focus on our bodies, the more we look at them, the more dissatisfied we are, the more critical we are. Research also indicates that exposure to images of thin, young, air-brushed female bodies is linked to depression, loss of self-esteem and the development of unhealthy eating habits in women and girls.
So we have a statistic of
Another young lady said, “I think the biggest thing that contributed to my eating disorder was probably society’s respect and admiration for thinness. When I lost weight I received a ton of attention. I long for that praise and admiration. I want people to tell me how thin I am. Society has taught me that it a higher compliment to be thin than to be smart, funny, or anything else.” So thinness has come not only to represent attractiveness but also to symbolize success, self-control and even higher socio-economic status. Personal success is measured by weight loss, weight maintenance as well as maintaining a youthful appearance. So that’s the new big realm, how dare we get old and age, you know we have to maintain this youthful appearance. The clear message to women is that how you look is who you are.
Illusion number two: “I Have to Give Up Me to be Loved by You,” the compulsion to please. Mary Pipher, the author of “Reviving Ophelia” said, “Adolescence is when girls experience social pressure to put aside their authentic selves and to display only a small portion of their gifts, or a small portion of who they really are. They learn to operate in the persona which is a show piece, a masquerade, they learn to perform.” So instead of reacting from their own feelings and values, their first response is how can I please in this situation? I don’t know if any of you can relate to that growing up as an adolescent, but we often want to please others and will do whatever that takes. Carol Gilligan noted that adolescent girls begin to hide their true selves in an effort to please and gain the approval of others. I see that in the media also.
Simone de Beauvoir said, “Adolescence is when girls realize that their only power comes from consenting, to become submissive, adored objects. Girls who were once the subjects of their own lives become the objects of others’ lives.” So they start living for other people instead of being who they really are. Young girls slowly bury their childhood, put away their independent and imperious selves and submissively enter adult existence. So what does that mean, to become an adult in our society today? If you were to only look at the media to get your information, what would you learn about what its mean to be an adult? Growing up pretty much means becoming sexual and you see more and more pictures of younger girls portrayed in a very sexualized way.
Many young women are living in terror of rejection, fearful that if they are not performing to other people’s expectations of them, they will not be accepted. Because they are terrified of being left alone or being left out, their only reality is to please other people. They do not have within themselves an individual standpoint. So that can be a dangerous thing. The Pediatrics Annals Journal noted that girls with anorexia have consistently been found to be compliant, approval-seeking, self-doubting, conflict avoidant, excessively dependent, perfectionistic and socially anxious. Now that may not be everyone, but that tends to be some of the traits and characteristics and many girls even say when they have been struggling with anorexia, they acknowledge that the decision to not eat is the first time in their lives that they have asserted their own will. So in a twisted kind of way, they are being themselves.
Illusion number 3 is: “Put on a Happy Face.” This is the compulsion to deny feelings. Those people living out this illusion work to maintain the appearance that they are doing just fine when in fact they are dying on the inside. They have learned to discount, minimize or rationalize their feelings. They have lost their ability for natural openness and honesty. They pretend things are different than how they really are. They discount their feelings and their perceptions. They rationalize hurtful behaviors. They may say they aren’t angry, disappointed or hurt when they really are and they tell themselves something isn’t important when it is. Our entire society very much functions in ways that keep us out of touch with what we know and what we feel. It’s very hard for a woman to know anything when she doesn’t even have a head and there are many ads where you don’t even see the head of the woman, you don’t see a face, you don’t see a brain. Women have frequently received messages that they are not to speak up, they are not to express themselves, and they are not to take up space. Women are to be seen, not heard. So they learn it is not okay to speak their truth.
And again, you see lots of images in the media that portray women with, either totally without a head or at least having their mouths covered or their mouths closed in some way. Women receive a clear message that they aren’t supposed to talk about their feelings. They learn to pretend that things are different that they really are. They learn to become an object. They learn to hide, to not be there. They learn to not know. Carol Gilligan said it’s this phenomenon, you learn to not know what you know. So, if you are hiding behind another self or you’re hiding behind something, who’s life are you really living and how can you really have fulfilling relationships when you are not really there in that relationship. The burden of hiding eventually becomes too heavy and this hiding and denials of one’s feelings really sets one up for addictions.
Advertising encourages us not only to objectify each other but also to feel that our most significant relationships are with the products we buy. Since our relationships aren’t working so well because we are hiding and we aren’t really there in our relationships, then we can turn to products, they are more satisfying actually than relationships. It turns lovers into things and things into lovers. Advertising corrupts relationships and then offers us products both as solace and as a substitute for the intimate human connection we all long for and need. One woman said, “I used to joke that Jack Daniel was my most constant lover.” And the purpose or function of any addiction is to put a buffer between ourselves and our awareness of our feelings. An addiction serves to numb us so that we are out of touch with what we know and what we feel. Anything can be used addictively, whether it be a substance like alcohol or a process like eating, work or bingeing and purging.
Many women feel that eating is a key to their emotional survival. You know, women get together and talk about this. One woman said, “When my boyfriend leaves I rush for the refrigerator and fill up the empty parts he could never reach. Since I can remember breads have nurtured and sustained me, grounded and tantalized me with their variety and substance.” One lady said, “When I’m stressed I need to chew, to ravage my food. My mouth aches with longing, only eating numbs me. Like an anesthetic, it stops the pain. Food, food is very good. It doesn’t get up and walk away. It’s doesn’t talk back. It doesn’t make any demands. It’s just there to please me.” So, you can ask yourself, when someone had been mean to you and everything is going wrong, when you are tired or too hot or too cold, or when you are bored or overwhelmed, or stuck, what foods help you put things right? Often we will turn to food for a source of comfort or as a way to deaden what we are feeling. Food is the only thing I can count for unconditional love. When I wasn’t eating there was a black hole inside of me. So, food has actually become a metaphor for how difficult it is to be a woman in our society.
Many professionals in the field agree that eating disorders have more to do with a calming problem than an eating problem. Over- and under-eating becomes a tool to calm down, to stop the pain or to get out of our feelings. Many of the girls say that they wish their parents had allowed them to tell them how they really felt. They wish there had been more open communication and the sense that it was okay to feel. One young lady said, “Feelings were not allowed in my home so I swallowed them.” Another said, “Allow people to speak up, to communicate about what they’re feeling and don’t call them whiners when they are actually just speaking from the heart about issues that are concerning and overwhelming them. Another said, “I wish I had just been more honest instead of laughing and pretending that I was happy when I was hurting so badly.” Another said, “Too often I ate in secret, looking to food for solace and companionship. Sometimes I fasted but the more I experimented with food, using food to express and to manage my emotions, the more obsessed I became.”
Eventually, we have to get to the meaning of what the soul is really hungry for in order to feed it. What is it that the person who is bingeing and purging can’t stomach? What terrible emptiness is the binge eater trying to fill? When individuals begin to recover from eating disorders, most of them will say that while eating disorders may begin with preoccupations with food and weight, they are most often about much more than food. People with eating disorders often use food and the control of food in an attempt to compensate for feelings and emotions that may otherwise seem overwhelming.
Illusion number 4: “I Have to be Perfect to be Loved.” This is the addiction to perfectionism. The media teaches us that it’s not okay to be human; it’s not okay to have any faults or the slightest imperfections. The glossy air-brushed models don’t even have pores, they don’t sweat. We all start to develop a distaste for being human. We would rather live on idolization and perfection and we even get to a point where we just don’t like imperfection not only in ourselves but in others. Cindy Crawford made this comment, she said, “Even I don’t wake up looking like Cindy Crawford. You know, they do all this stuff to make me look the way I look.” We begin to live for an ideal. It’s an image of what life should be and it simply is not real.
Being perfect can wear many masks and take on many forms. A common rationale or cognitive response to pain is perfectionism. Perfectionism is driven by the belief that if a person’s behavior is perfect, then there will be no reason to be criticized and therefore no cause for rejection or pain. However, you soon learn that no matter what you do it’s never good enough. Since your efforts were never experienced, adequate or good enough, you did not develop an internal sense of how much is good enough. So, you kind of flounder through life doing, doing and doing and never feeling satisfied that what you are doing is enough.
We all have an idea about what the perfect child, athlete, scholar, wife, mother, husband, father, whatever is. We get trapped into these ideals and our whole world is centered around achievement and performance. Who we are, our natural being, is repressed and performance becomes everything. And that’s a very stressful, unfulfilling way to live, where everything is about performance. Here’s a quote from a young lady. She said, “My quest for academic achievement was largely driven by the longing for my father’s love. But somehow all the A’s in the world seemed powerless to win his affection or to fill my lonely heart. My father demanded nothing less than perfection and it seemed to me that at any moment my deepest fear would be exposed and confirmed. The fear that at some essential, revocable level I didn’t measure up; the fear that he withheld his love because I didn’t deserve it in the first place.” So that’s a terrible fear to live with also. Another young lady said, “I don’t blame my parents for my disorder but I never felt I could go to them with my concerns or problems. They had very high expectations and were very critical of everything I did. I grew up thinking only perfect girls are worthy of being loved.”
Worth becomes equated with performance. I am worthwhile, I am a deserving worthy person if I perform well enough. So, worth is based on grades, honors, achievements, weight, how I look, possessions, popularity, approval, all of those things. All of those things are external which make it very difficult to ever feel satisfied and fulfilled. If we are living for an ideal, driving ourselves as hard as we can to be perfect, we lose the natural slow rhythm of life. There is just rushing to attain the ideal. The slower pace of the beat of the earth, the state where we simply are, is forgotten. So, how do we go about dissolving these illusions that so many of us are caught up in, that so many of us have bought into? Four things that I can think of, there are many more than this but we need to do the emotional work of getting back in touch with our feelings. We need to do body work. I’m going to talk a little bit more about those, media literacy and spiritual work. This is just a very quick summary of some of the ideas.
Here’s a quote by a woman who recovered from an eating disorder. She said, “Eating disorders are a wonderful tool for self discovery because they give us tangible feedback that something is amiss. Whenever we crave food when we are not hungry or we start thinking our thighs are too fat or we start wanting to count fat grams, it is usually a signal that we are having some uncomfortable feeling or that we are in some uncomfortable situation. Once we become aware of these signals, we then have the perfect opportunity to look beneath them at the underlying feelings and the original wounding they might be related to. We then learn how to process the feelings in a way that won’t be detrimental to our bodies and soul and can be healing instead.” So like she said, you have to learn when you have those feelings of not being good enough, feeling like you’re too fat, that that is a signal to look at something, to look at your feelings and to look at what’s really causing that.
Emotional work involves learning to trust your own internal wisdom; allowing your feelings to be your inner guidance system; learning to make decisions for yourself, not based on what other people think. My friend told me that she took her daughter out to buy some shoes for school and her daughter picked out a pair of shoes that she really liked and when she went to school her friends sort of made fun of her shoes. So she came back home and said I don’t like these shoes anymore and her mom sat down with her and said well, explain that to me because when we went and picked these shoes out you really liked them, you were really excited about getting these shoes. She helped her realize that she really did like the shoes but because her friends didn’t like the shoes, she decided she didn’t like the shoes. I think her mom very artfully took the time to help her see that sometimes people aren’t going to like the same things you like but that doesn’t mean what you like is any less valid or worthy. Learning to honor feelings and express what you really think instead of pleasing people; learning to say no and to speak up and say what you really think and feel.
Here’s another quote from a women recovering from an eating disorder. She said, “Once when my therapist asked me how I felt I answered that I felt fat. She surprised me by saying that ‘fat was not a feeling.’ However, it was the only feeling I knew, even when I was not overweight I still felt fat. All feelings made me feel uncomfortable in my body so I put them on my body and labeled them as fat. It was a very long time later that I realized that anger, sadness, delight, apprehension, joy, despair, were feelings I had, not descriptions of myself.” We must learn to really understand what we are feeling and learning to let those feelings teach us and guide us.
Body work is about learning to listen to the body; learning to eat when you are hungry and to stop when you are full. Learning what to eat, what the body wants and giving the body rest, relaxation, recreation, exercising and moving the body, accepting and appreciating the body. A young lady said, “I don’t know why I wasn’t taught that my body was not an object to be twisted into something it could never be.” This was like a revelation to her. “I don’t know why I wasn’t taught that my body was sacred and deserved honor and respect. I don’t know why I wasn’t taught to look in the mirror and see myself. I wonder how my life would have been different if women’s bodies weren’t treated as objects.” She must learn to get in touch with her body and love her body and appreciate her body.
Therapist named Marion Woodman said, “I tell people I work with to give the body an hour a day to really listen. If you are not worth an hour a day there is nothing I can do for you. Warning signs from the body are to be heard and obeyed rather than ignored and feelings to be honored rather than starved, gorged or made numb. The body must be attended to. When the body is fully open we can trust our own feelings and actions. They anchor us in an inner home. The body protects and guides. It’s symptoms are the sign posts that reconnect to our lost soul.” So our bodies are interconnected with our minds and our spirits. Our culture teaches us to live mostly in our heads and not in our bodies. Many times we are so lost in our thoughts that we lose the subtle signals that other parts of our bodies are giving us. Part of the work is learning to be present in our bodies, moving out of obsessive thinking in our heads and feeling what is happening in our bodies.
Another point is media literacy. I’m not going to go into a lot of depth, just remember that the media is all about—especially advertising— and it is all about persuasion. They want to persuade you to buy something. They want to persuade you that you need something. It’s also about deception because they are not truthful. These products they are selling aren’t going to deliver the promises they indicate in the advertising. The media is very much about addiction, offering products instead of healthy relationships. It’s about control, fantasy and illusion, because nothing that is portrayed (usually, but not always) is not true.
Here’s a great quote I like from Sara Ban Breathnach. She said, “I can tell you to stop reading the magazines, watching TV and going to movies that continuously reinforce our belief that perfection is possible. But you are not going to listen to me. Instead, next time you see a gorgeous woman on the cover of a magazine, or a room to die for, or a meal that would take a professional chef a week to prepare, begin to chant “you’re not real, you’re not real, you’re not real.” The woman, the room and the meal that are depicted to inspire but really to diminish us are illusions conjured up by professionals, paid handsomely, to manipulate reality.”
President Faust said, “What a clever and seductive plan. What a way to distract us and keep us from understanding the influence we have and what we can affect in the lives of others if we are so distracted and overwhelmed with what the clothing, diet and entertainment industry say we need to look like. These pursuits can take up not only an immense amount of time but an inordinate amount of energy and can totally consume us, our lives, and this precious probationary period which we have been allotted.” So, spiritual work is also an important aspect of overcoming these illusions. “My eating disorder forced me to look deep within myself, to come home and to realize that there was something very beautiful and powerful that lay beneath all of the self-hatred and criticism. My enemy was actually my friend. She showed me parts of myself I never knew existed and taught me to love all of myself.”
I think an important question to consider is what is your spiritual calling? What is your purpose in life? This is what a young lady said, “Throughout my recovery I kept wondering what my true purpose was on this earth. I just couldn’t believe that all I was here for was to be fat and then lose weight. There has to be more to life than that.” Another young lady said, “I used to believe that God was only there for people who are really good and deserved it but not for me. So, I believed I had to do everything by myself without any help. When I slowly began to understand that maybe God loved me and maybe he had been loving me all along, then I was able to share my burden and ask for help. My faith that he was there for me slowly grew day by day and I was able to let go of a lot of the fear and control knowing that I was not alone and eventually I learned to trust that whether or not I could see him or feel him he was there guiding me.”
To conclude with, I like this quote from Patricia Holland. She said, “Appreciation for our worth has nothing to do with the applause of one’s neighbor and has everything to do with having integrity before the Lord. We all need a higher image of ourselves but Satan would have us believe it comes totally from the praise of others when in fact it comes from our relationship with God.” I believe the spiritual practices of prayer, journaling, meditation, reading God’s words and pondering, enable us to get a more accurate sense of who we are and of how things really are, versus being distracted by all the external messages and images. Also, immersing ourselves in God’s creations – flowers, trees, birds, animals, sunsets, stars, etc. can give us a sense of what true beauty is and can help us recover from these illusions.