Media and Twinkies

I was a chubby kid growing up. My parents would always tell me that it’s what is inside a person that matters. I guess I took that to heart. Just about everyone deals with the process of losing that horrible baby fat and blaming their Mom for the fattening food that she brought home. Those that are lucky enough to get out of that stage and lose weight, learning what calories and weight management are, but I wasn’t one of those. I didn’t lose weight until at the age of 18 had my first boyfriend. My Mother never encouraged me to lose weight or thought that I was fat. My Mom was a great cook and I liked eating. I lost weight my eating noting but ice and non-fat yogurt. I didn’t even think of how unhealthy that was, I just noticed that once I began to lose weight, I wanted to be skinnier; like a model. I never quite made it there, thank goodness.

Most girls lose sight of the healthy reasons for their weight loss evolving it into reasons portrayed by the media of the self-image. Though people can’t always see that watching all the skinny models and girls in Hollywood seeming so “perfect” affect their persona of themselves, it does. The media puts such an intense pressure on young girls today to look like the “ideal” image. The medias harmful affect on the self body image and self esteem of young girls has brought about some of these three damaging effects: eating disorders, mental depression, and physical depression (Domil, 2012).

The media is always soliciting a new form of a pill or company to jump on board with to lose weight; showing gorgeous, tan, cardboard abs, perfect figured girls next to the ad. Seeing this gorgeous girl no doubt would motivate anyone to want to workout to look like that. Many girls though have been choosing the easy way out to losing weight, feeling the need to starve themselves and thus developing an eating disorder.

At what point will any of us feel like we reach the medias “expectations”? In Allie Kovar’s article, Effects of the Media on Body Image, she mentions “the national eating disorder Association reports that in the past 70 years national rates of incidences of all eating disorders have dramatically increased across the board. Bulimia in women between the ages of 10 to 39 has more than tripled” (Kovar, 2012). This information leaves us to wonder how much worse it has gotten. Though we are unable to stop the effects of media images on this growing epidemic of eating disorders, we must train our minds to not be affected by such “unrealistic body shapes” (Kovar, 2012).

Another feature that follows along with the medias effect on young girls is mental depression. Exposing young women to images of thin, attractive models increases body dissatisfaction and other negative feelings like depression, which in turn has a side effect of gaining more weight. Continuously being exposed to these images brought about many negative connotations in the self-image of women. The average women do not look like the images depicted in magazines shown by the media, so why do they constantly feel pressure to look like that? Research has shown that mental depression begins at a young age, kids learning by what they have seen in the media as “ideal,” following them into their teenage and even adult years. “If children grow up seeing thin women in advertisements, on television, and in film they accept this as reality and try to imitate their appearance and their actions” (Shea, 2012). When they find this appearance to be impossible they get down on themselves and begin to feel inadequate. For many girls depressed from the exposure to the ultra thin air brushed pictures need to be informed of the measures that are taken to alter many images in advertisements in order to clarify that humans do not naturally look like those illustrations (Haas et. al, 2012), therefore they shouldn’t compare their bodies with these photo-shopped illusions of perfection.

I know that at my age, I am glad to not worry about my body image. That is not to say I don’t still work out and watch what I eat but I do so for my health, not my self-image. Those who have broken free from the medias chains just in time to control its endangering affects are no doubt glad because no matter where we are or what we do in life, media is going to be there right by our side. The media is only going to get worse and put more pressure on the self body image of how it should “ideally” look. Next time we begin to feel like we are not good enough, we need to remember that we are not alone and that everyone feels the same way we do at one point. The skinny twigs we see on TV are unrealistic and unhealthy; we are the true ideal of the human body, a real woman, inside and out.

Works Cited
Domil, Tiffanie. “The Influence of the Media Images Upon Body System.” The Influence of the Media images Upon Body System. Mukul Bhalla, 19 May 2003. Web. 20 Aug. 2012.

Haas, Cheryl J.; Pawlow, Laura A.; Pettibone, Jon; Segrist, Dan J. “An Intervention for the Negative Influence of Media on Body System.” College Student Journal. Jun 2012, Vol. 46, Issue 2 P.405-418. 14p.

Kovar, Allie. “Health Psychology Home Page.” Effects of Media on Body Image. David Schlundt PhD., 30 Apr. 2009. Web. 20 Aug. 2012.

Schlegel, A. V. (2015). How the Media Affects the Self Esteem and Body Image of Young Girls. Retrieved 3 20, 2015, from DivineCaroline: http://www.divinecaroline.com/self/wellness/how-media-affects-self-esteem-and-body-image-young-girls.

Shea, Sara. “Nature vs. Nurture: The Media’s Effect on Body Image.” The River Reporter. N.p., 8 May 2009. Web. 20 Aug. 2012.

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