Body image 1996

But the long-running war may have reached a turning point. This past fall, a team of Dartmouth psychologists observing Harvardstudents reported a slight downturn in disordered eating behaviors and an increase in self-acceptance of body weight and shape. Whether their findings mark the beginning of a true change in attitudes or a mere fluctuation is not yet clear. "Body dissatisfaction and desire to lose weight were still the norm for more than 70 percent of the women," the researchers stressed in the American Journal of Psychiatry. Moreover, other researchers elsewhere are reporting record levels of body dissatisfaction.

Body image is a complex and puzzling topic, one that has fascinated psychologists and neurologists for many years. It is a term that almost everyone seems to grasp but even experts do not really understand. It is concerned not only with external and objective attributes but also with subjective representations of physical appearance: beliefs, feelings, sensations, and perceptions about the body.

Most of the information on body image is based on clinical populations, women (and some men) with serious psychological disorders such as anorexia and bulimia nervosa or people with physical deformities. However, everyone has a body image and it has strong emotional overtones based on our experiences in life. Our image of our body plays a major role in how we feel, what we do, whom we meet, whom we marry, and what career path we choose, even if its precise meaning and its role in mental well-being continue to elude psychologists.

Eating disorders are one manifestation of negative body image. They involve an intense preoccupation with fatness, leading to extreme attempts to control body weight. There is evidence that the epidemic increase in eating disorders since the 1960s is related to the intense social and cultural pressures on women to conform to a thin ideal of feminine attractiveness that is unnatural for most women. As many observers have noted, today's body image ideal is unprecedented, both in degree of thinness and extent of dissemination.

Research has shown that dieting to lose weight and fear of fatness are common in girls as young as nine, and these attitudes and behaviors escalate significantly during adolescence, particularly among those at the heavier end of the spectrum. The risk of developing an eating disorder is eight times higher among dieting 15-year-old girls than among non-dieting age-mates. In American culture, those exposed to more pressure to diet are at greater risk for eating disorders. This includes athletes in activities that emphasize leanness to enhance performance or appearance, notably women in gymnastics, figure skating, and ballet, and men in wrestling.

Not surprisingly, one of the keys to helping people overcome eating disorders is fostering the development of a positive body image. Unfortunately, this involves swimming up the cultural stream since the "thin is beautiful" message is ubiquitous. The media plays a huge role as a cultural gatekeeper, framing standards of beauty by the models they choose. There is also evidence that these standards promote insecurity among women (and, increasingly, men) regarding physical appearance. Studies of prime-time television indicate that programs are dominated by thin body types and that thinness is consistently associated with the portrayal of favorable personality traits.

However, one of the most interesting aspects of the psychology of appearance is that not all people succumb to the cultural stereotypes. The development of positive body image is an intriguing phenomenon and one in which we, as psychologists who have extensively studied eating disorders, are particularly interested. Given today's focus on an unusually thin body ideal widely pictured in the media, why don't all women in our culture have eating disorders?

In our studies documenting widespread body dissatisfaction, we have found a subgroup of women who actually feel satisfied with their appearance. Some are satisfied even though their body size deviates significantly from the widely pictured ideal. These women have achieved self-acceptance despite bombardment with cultural messages linking happiness and attractiveness with thinness.

In the study of Harvard students, fewer men and women were engaged in chronic dieting in 1992 versus 1982, and more of them were eating three meals a day. The women were also an average of five pounds heavier!

The findings suggest that a "new" idea may be gaining ground: it is time to be comfortable with one's body even if it does not conform to cultural body size ideals. Some people are naturally fatter, others naturally thinner. Perhaps the healthiest course is to accept yourself the way you are, rather than try to mold yourself into some narrowly defined ideal.