Low self-esteem is another factor into causing a person to turn to an eating disorder. Low self-esteem is when a person with an eating disorder cannot be happy with anything they do. Being overweight is hard to cope with in this day and age. Many teens get very depressed when they are overweight because people tease them and they cannot fit in with the crowd. Sometimes, even if a teenager is not overweight, they feel they must maintain their body size so they can look like models and television stars.
It is unfortunate, but in today’s society, people have forgotten that it is what’s inside a person that counts, not what’s on the outside. We need to start loving and accepting each other for who we are, and not what we look like. Magazines should be teaching teenagers of today to be proud of whom they are. Parents also need to teach their children the value of healthy living and not send the message that being thin is important. Family and friends need to support people with weight problems and not make them feel guilty about how they look.
Eating disorders are simple illnesses largely misunderstood and misdiagnosed. The most common eating disorders are anorexia, bulimia, and binge eating disorder – the are on the rise in Europe and worldwide. No one knows exactly what causes eating disorders.
More than 90% of those with eating disorders are women. Further, the number of English women affected by these illnesses has doubled to at least five million in the past three decades.
More teenagers are reading magazines every day, and in most magazines there is help pages where an agony aunt answers personal problems. Nine times out of ten, these problem pages include a letter from a teenager asking ‘am I weird?’ because they are different, because they aren’t thin, and that they are being bullied. What can they do? Agony aunts only ever have one answer: just because you’re different doesn’t mean you’re weird, and because you’re bigger than everyone else doesn’t mean that you aren’t beautiful.
If big is beautiful, and being big is OK, then why do magazines constantly promote models who are thin, and clothes that would only look good on supermodels? Even their attempts at bringing in fashions for different shaped people doesn’t include ‘fat’ people, they just include taller or shorter people.
Some argue that magazines and the media have nothing to do with it and that it’s down to the individual person whether they want to go about losing weight the right or wrong way. It’s normally magazines and the media themselves who deny that they have anything to do with eating disorders when, in fact, most people when asked would say that the media and magazines are a prime factor to the low self-esteem in teenagers today. You always hear “I wish I looked like j-lo” or the latest celebrity on the front page of a magazine or newspaper.
From all my research, from mine and other people’s views and opinions, I’ve come to the conclusion that media and magazines have a massive impact on not only teenage lives and feelings, but adults as well. The awareness of males with eating disorders needs to be heightened too. Magazines should be aware of the influence they have on people of all ages, and should try to change the image they put across page after page, week after week. In a perfect world, there would be people of all different sizes in magazines and on TV. In reality, things aren’t going to change because somebody bigger than a size 10 doesn’t sell products.
