The media teach us
that our primary goals as women
should be weight loss and the pursuit of beauty,
and this is particularly true of celebrities.
--
Maybe it's time for us all to stop chasing pavements
in that direction
and instead,
start rolling in the deeper goals.
In a recent study, researchers found that 100% of women felt bad about their appearance after looking at beauty magazines for just a few minutes. From one of the authors: “Surprisingly, we found that weight was not a factor. Viewing these pictures was just bad for everyone,” said Laurie Mintz, associate professor of education, school and counseling psychology in the MU College of Education. “It had been thought that women who are heavier feel worse than a thinner woman after viewing pictures of the thin ideal in the mass media. The study results do not support that theory."
I happened upon this brilliant way of fighting back. This was part of a campaign by the National Eating Disorder Information Centre (NEDIC) in Canada that targeted beauty magazines. From NEDIC's website: "To involve the public in our campaign, this transit shelter ad appeals to dieters and those who feel the pressure to diet (virtually all women), empowering them with a way to really shed their weight problem."
Close-up:
Text at bottom of display:
"Recent studies confirm reading beauty magazines makes us feel fat."
Another study demonstrated "... the role of the media in shaping, rather than merely reflecting, societal perceptions of the female body. Consistent with our hypothesis, it was found that women's body image satisfaction is, indeed, influenced by their exposure to the thin ideal presented in fashion magazines."
(Want more? Here's one of my previous posts on this topic.)
Introducing Skinny Hangers!
Because you can never be too skinny --
and apparently, neither can your hangers.
Just make sure to avoid this kind,
no matter how skinny they are:
We often measure our success as women in numbers -- judging ourselves in terms of pounds, size, and age. Lower numbers indicate success, while higher equal failure. And as such, we’ve developed a counter-intuitive association between losing and gaining. In our worlds, losing equals success and gaining equals failure.
We focus on losing weight, lowering our sizes, taking years off our faces. But consider for a moment how refreshing it would feel to focus on losing the following instead:
insecurity
anxiety/depression
self-critical voice
hopelessness
judging ourselves from the outside in
And instead of worrying about gaining weight, going up in size, or showing years on our faces, how great would it be if we could gain these?:
confidence passion intuitive knowledge joyfulness/hopefulness experiencing ourselves from the inside out
Our culture has taught us the convoluted notion that losing superficial aspects of ourselves like weight will lead to positive internal states like happiness. But then there always seems to be one more step to take, one more improvement to make, one more product to buy. That carrot is continually dangled farther and farther away, making us feel like failures, and drawing us toward that extra slice of carrot cake for temporary relief. This cycle may be self-defeating to us, but it also helps the beauty and diet industries gain billions of dollars in revenue, while losing nothing.
Maybe it’s time to reexamine what losing and gaining really mean.
© 2010 Nancy Lynne Kanter
