Eating disorders : To become supermodels?

From early-on children are taught by society that their looks matter.With an increased population of children who spend a lot of time in front of television, there are more of them coming up with a superficial sense of who they are. Images on television spend countless hours telling us to lose weight, be thin and beautiful, so that people will like us. Media rarely depicts men and women with "average" body-types , ingraining unconsciously in our minds that we must have the figure portrayed on television. Overweight characters are typically portrayed as lazy, the one with no friends, while thin women and pumped-up men are the successful, popular, and sexy. How can we tell our children that it's what's inside that counts, when the media continuously contradicts this message?

Increasingly, the media are seen as somehow responsible for the apparent growth of eating disorder. (Maggie, W. , Barrie, G. ,2005) Certainly the mass media are relatively modern phenomenon and their rise does seem parallel to the escalation of a kind of thin fascism. (Maggie, W. , Barrie, G. ,2005)
Today, you cannot read a magazine or newspaper, turn on the television, or shop at the mall without being assaulted with the message that fat is bad. By being constantly exposed, the mental development of you or your child gets distorted. Modelling agencies have been reported to actively pursue Anorexic models. Adolescents often feel fatally flawed if their weight, hips, and breasts do not match up to those of models and actors.Thus, there is an increasing number of people being on a diet, not eating proper meals and even taking pills to control hunger which in the long term leads to severe aneroxic cases and others too.

Furthermore,it is often portrayed that it is normal to be aneroxic because celebrities are doing it. http://www.skinnyland.com/blog/category/anorexic/ . For example : Jessica Alba In 2005, Jessica admitted that she used to have an eating disorder. She talked about how it was because she grew up in a family that was overweight, so she had always wanted to be skinnier. Is anorexic a MUST have phase in everyone's life?

In conclusion, Preventing eating disorder is clearly an issue that everyone will need to do more for. The media needs to play a more responsible role on the images shown to our impressionable younger generations.

References

Maggie, W. , Barrie, G. ,(2005).The media and body image;if looks could kill. Sage publications.

http://www.casapalmera.com/blog/top-10-celebrities-with-eating-disorders/