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Maybe it's not the scale we should be mad at.
My doctoral student, Ellen Albertson, is a wellness coach, nutritionist and author. She's written for publications such as Self, Good Housekeeping and Better Homes and Gardens. Her dissertation uses self-compassion meditation to address esteem and body image issues in middle aged women.
Ellen and I have worked on a variety of research together, including a paper documenting contradictory diet messages in women's magazines. Some magazines offer miracle diets alongside recipes for rich cakes on virtually every cover. This is the kind of contradictory psychological world middle aged women live in and try their best to navigate. Even with eduation and open-minded personal philosophies, women still feel bad about our bodies. Maybe it's not so much the bodies that are the problem, but the impossible expectations that move us to do some pretty crazy things. Ellen wrote the following report about some of her experiences being a wellness coach and the lengths some women will go to to try and grab the elusive brass ring:
Recently the New York Times ran a story entitled, “Bridal Hunger Games” discussing the latest trends in pre wedding weight loss. All the usual suspects were mentioned — Atkins and organic juice cleanses, illegal injections of the fertility hormone human chorionic gonadotrpin (HCG), and calorie-restricted diets accompanied by prescription pills and vitamin B shots.
What was new and disturbing was the addition of tube feeding as a weight loss method. According to the article, 41-year-old Jessica Schnaider spent $1,500 to have a feeding tube inserted up her nose so that she could receive 800 calories a day without eating and lose a dress size or two before the big day. Why would a perfectly healthy woman undergo such an invasive, uncomfortable procedure meant to sustain life for patients who have conditions like cancer, anorexia or paralysis?
While brides, who want to look good for their wedding, often go to extremes, we live in a world where many women spend incredible amounts of time and energy hoping to change their bodies. Why? Why don’t we just eat right, exercise, accept our bodies and enjoy the health benefits? Where does the desire to look like a supermodel, movie star or celebrity come from?
The longing to look like the myriad of media images we see comes from the media images themselves. Everyday we are bombarded by hundreds of pictures of perfection — white teeth, flawless skin, shinny hair, long legs sans hair, big breasts, tiny waists… In a process known as social comparison we evaluate ourselves against these artificial images and come up short. We feel ashamed, guilty, ugly. Clearly we have failed and desperately want to change our bodies so that we can resemble the beauty ideals that we see on our screens and in the pages of the glossy magazines we read to relax.
Fortunately all the pages promise us salvation. Have a faulty body part to fix? There are miracle cures for everything. Skimpy lashes, flabby thighs or frizzy hair: forget about it! The solution to all your body woes is only a click away. The problem is that none of these magic bullets will leave you looking like Beyonce who like all good celebrity moms bounced back to her prepregnancy weight 30 seconds post partum. Now here’s a trend new moms can get behind: The Epidural Diet, no pain weight loss.
Negative body image, body dissatisfaction, the pursuit of the thin ideal, and constant dieting have become so prevalent in girls and women that the phenomenon is described as “normative discontent.” These feelings are so common that women may actually express dissatisfaction with their looks because everyone else is endorsing this type of self-degradation. Research by Salk and Engeln-Maddox found that 93 percent of the college women they surveyed admitted to engaging in “fat talk,” and approximately a third said they did it often.
In a world where slenderness is glorified and fatness is stigmatized, internalizing the desire to be thin starts early, which is why these feelings are so hard to alter in adulthood. In an ingenious experiment designed to see how early girls accept the cultural beauty ideal of thinness as their own standard, Harriger and colleagues asked preschoolers to choose from a thin, fat or average body size game piece to play Candy Land or Chutes and Ladders. The majority of girls, 69 percent selected a thin piece. 20 percent selected average size pieces, and only 11 percent selected a fat piece. To assess the emotional investment each girl had with her game piece, the girls were then asked if they wanted to switch their game piece for another one. Girls who selected the thin piece were the least willing to switch to the fat body game piece when asked.
In another experiment psychologists at the University of Sussex had teenage girls either look at music videos featuring attractive members of girl bands like the Pussycat Dolls and Girls Aloud, listen to just the music in these videos or learn a list of neutral words. After only ten minutes of exposure, the girls who watched the music videos experienced much greater increases in body dissatisfaction as compared to the other groups.
Like the feeding tube incident the results of these studies are disturbing. However, there is a way we can truly feel better about our bodies and ourselves. First, we can start to understand that the media misguides our perceptions and choose not to compare ourselves to these images. No, most 40-year-old women do not look like the characters portrayed on Desperate Housewives. And yes, the majority of images you see of “perfect bodies” have been Photoshopped.
Second, accept that no diet or exercise regime is going to transform your body so that you have “perfect” abs, arms, butt and thighs. Third, embrace who you are and how you look right now. You may not be able to transform your body, but you can transform your mind. Health, well-being and self-esteem come in all shapes and sizes. Finally, we can support each other a promote a world where women and girls of all shapes and sizes can feel good about their bodies and themselves.
A few weeks ago, I received a post on Women’s Health, one of the websites she writes for, asking for help from a woman who wanted to lose 5-10 pounds of fat so that she looked nice in a bikini for the summer. She was already doing everything right — exercising four to five times per week, feeling strong, choosing healthy foods to eat. Ellen pointed out that the images she was comparing herself to often weren’t real and suggested that she compare herself to real, average women. She wrote back and admitted to having a “warped” view of things, and decided to make a conscious effort to appreciate her curves. In the end she realized she was glad she no longer looked like a teenager and set a new goal — “to fully embrace myself as I am, healthy and strong.” Now that’s an alternative to tube feedings and youtube videos that we all can embrace.
Image credit: sheknows.com
