Disordered Eating in Adolescent Girls: Why American Pop Culture Can Be Deadly

I once had a friend called Girl. At age sixteen, she ate what she wanted, but she was a ballet dancer, so she was always watching her figure. Then one day she met Boy. Girl and Boy began dating, and before long Girl's friends noticed she was losing weight. At first, we said, "You look amazing!" However, Girl got to the point at which she would no longer eat anything between seven in the morning and three in the afternoon. She was starving, and when I told her to eat, she said, "I will stop being hungry after a few days, and my stomach will shrink. Besides, when I get home, I will eat a whole meatball the size of my fist." Friends constantly asked me if Girl was okay; she was so thin. I truthfully answered that I was not sure. When Girl said that she could not find a dress for Homecoming because she looked fat, I asked her what size she wore, and she replied, "Size one." I was tired of telling my good friend to eat while she wasted away, and I hated her boyfriend for encouraging her anorexia. Worst of all, even with her unhealthy appearance and obvious psychological instability, I was jealous of her. Why? She looked like the women in the magazines. She could wear whatever she wanted and look "cute." Such is the power of the pervasive images of thinness in American society today.

According to the Eating Disorders Coalition, a 2006 study by the Renfrew Center found that forty percent of nine- year- old girls have dieted. Another study by Margo Maine indicates that nine percent of nine- year- old girls have vomited in order to lose weight. Girls in America are becoming concerned about their weights at younger and younger ages. What makes American adolescents so obsessed with body image? While studies show that adolescent eating disorders are caused by many factors including genetics and a psychological need to have control, the fact that eating disorders are occurring earlier and more frequently suggests that the environment, particularly the media, is the leading cause of these disturbing diseases. Celebrities such as Nicole Richie and Lindsey Lohan (right) have been on every magazine cover imaginable, pictured under headlines such as, "How She Lost the Weight: You Can Do It, Too!" Adolescents are constantly bombarded with glorified images of rail-thin celebrities and models. Magazines, catalogs, television shows, billboards, movies, and concerts are all venues of extremely thin women. While follow- up magazine issues tend to contradict themselves by stating that these same celebrities have become too thin, the psychological damage to adolescent girls has already been done. In a culture that produces clothes that look best on thin figures, a culture that equates thinness with beauty, what else are young girls supposed to think other than, "I need to be thin."

The truth is, not everyone is physically meant to be a size two. Each person's body has what is called a set point, the weight at which the body is genetically predisposed to remain. Naturally, adolescence is accompanied by biological changes including weight gain. Beginning to associate with boys, used to their stick- thin pre- pubescent bodies, and surrounded by the increasingly thin images in the media, young girls panic when they start to gain weight and try to fight the process by starving themselves or purging. What they do not realize is that after adolescence their bodies will most likely thin back down naturally to their set points. What if a woman's set point is simply higher than the "standard" in the American media? This means that she is doomed to have low self- esteem about her body. She will probably attempt to fight her set point for her whole life, possibly taking extreme measures such as starvation, obsessive exercise, or purging.

Lynn Ponton reports that, in America, "Ninety- five percent of all women do not have the ideal body type portrayed by the media, and up to sixty percent of all women and girls eat in a dysfunctional fashion." While suggestions have been made to turn the increasing frequency of eating disorders in America into a political matter, the advertisements continue to feature unrealistically thin women. In September 2006, models who measured below a Body Mass Index of 18, such as the model on the left, were turned away from Madrid's fashion week. The regional government said that the fashion industry had a responsibility to portray healthy body images, because, "Fashion is a mirror and many teenagers imitate what they see on the catwalk." Letizia Moratti, the mayor of Milan, Italy, is also planning on putting similar restrictions on Milan's fashion show. This Wednesday, fashion bosses from Milan, Paris, London, and New York met to discuss ways to address eating disorders, but the only plan the New York representatives agreed to was to "launch consultations with designers aimed at encouraging the use of healthy- looking girls."

Will American policy- makers ever feel responsible enough for the public's health to adopt the policies now in place in Milan and Madrid? Is it possible for America to change its way of thinking to find healthier bodies more attractive? While healthier body images in the media would not completely eliminate eating disorders in American adolescent females, they would certainly help most girls to feel better about their bodies. Young girls need to know that the models are the women who are not normal, weighing approximately twenty- three percent less than the average woman. When it comes to eating disorders, most people are not aware of the serious physical effects, shown in the chart to the right, including malnutrition, dehydration, muscle atrophy, high or low blood pressure, diabetes, kidney infection or failure, osteoporosis, poor circulation, and heart failure. People also do not know that eating disorders carry the highest mortality rate of all the mental illnesses (up to 20%). The bottom line is that the American government must take these risks into account and begin treating eating disorders as a federal responsibility, or the media will continue to feature too- thin women, and American females will continue to obsess over their bodies. Nine- year- olds will continue worrying about their images to the point where they vomit to lose weight. They will continue breaking under the pressure of the media to be thin until many of them die.