Body Image Essay

Whether society is watching a show on television, reading their favorite magazine, or scrolling through the news feed on social media, they will notice that there is a specific body type that is portrayed in America today. Through these images that are viewed, a trend has been set by Americans to achieve the ideal body image, and the effect is detrimental to society today because it increases eating disorders, mental illnesses, chronic health issues, suicide, and unhealthy lifestyles in men, women, and teenagers.

The media plays a major role in the way our society sets certain standards and forms opinions. No matter where we go, the media is everywhere. The message that the media illustrates today is that “thin is in”. When was the last time you flipped through a magazine or through the television channels without seeing some type of advertisement promoting a new diet or new product being promoted by a super thin model or actress? Young girls are the main targets for new products. It is common for young girls to be obsessed with what is “in”. The message that young girls are getting from the media is that having bones sticking out is the way to look. They then become preoccupied with their bodies and self image. “ The exposure to ideal images coincides with a period in their lives where self regard and self efficacy is in decline, where body image is at its most fragile due to physical changes of puberty and where tendency for social comparison is at its peak” (www.eating-disorders.org.uk/docs/media.doc). The media illustrates to young girls an “idealized” shape which leads to being beautiful, popular, successful, and loved but which is not realistic to have unless you have the “idealized” shape. Therefore, they believe that their lives will be perfect as long as they are thin and have the “idealized” shape. The two main sources of media that reach young girls are television and magazines.

Some young girls are already experiencing body dissatisfaction. By the age of 5-8, numerous young girls were familiar with the idea of dieting and weight loss. Due to media exposure, such as reading magazines, watching television, or listening to peers often cause girls of age 6 to desire a thin woman’s figure opposed to a thicker one. Girls at this young of age should not be worried about their physical appearance, they should play outside and enjoy being young while it lasts. Not only does media affect women, it affects very young women as well.

The influence of the media on all aspect of society has spread like wildfire especially in the United States. One specific influence by the media is body image, large number of young women and girls look up to people in the media and are influenced by the way they look. Now days you’re appraised on your attractiveness, the way you look, the way you dress, and especially how thin you are. The media’s representation of body image has contributed to the social trend of an unhealthy lifestyle. Women and young girls today are fixated on trying modify the way they look to achieve the perfect body image set by the standards of society. Female’s worry about the way they look starting at young ages from the unhealthy image of the Barbie doll to the

Body image is an important and influential topic in our society that impacts the self-esteem, good eating habits and body satisfaction of female adolescents. Magazines and TV programs use beauty and ideal thinness to connect with young ladies and persuade them to look as good as the models in magazines by purchasing their dieting products. As asserted by Dohnt and Tiggemann, in order to advocate for female adolescents, we need to introduce programs in schools and TV with a purpose of strengthening their self-esteem (935). Although I disagree with Dohnt and Tiggemann point about introducing preventive programs in the TV, I fully endorse with introducing preventive programs in schools because it helps young adolescents to build on their understanding of an actual body shape. The media is the most influential factor in the body image of a young woman because as insisted by Gallivan, “over 80% of Americans watch TV daily, 3 hours on average.” Overall, this demonstrates that TV programs, social media, and magazines play the major role in the perception and mindset of a young women because in our generation we dedicate most of our time to watch shows and commercials that influence the way we think about

In order to understand healthy body image, a person must have some background on the subject. Many young people are prone to developing diseases concerning their weight that are unhealthy for our bodies. The media have enticed our minds with the idea of a ‘perfect’ body. Women want a slim body figure with no curves and men want a muscular body. The crave for a perfect body has gotten so severe that many people have turned to excessive weight control practices. “Research

Positive or negative body image can highly affect one’s self-esteem. High self-esteem is important because “[self-esteem] can be viewed as a key indicator of psychological well-being” (Clay, 2005). Cognitive health can be just as vital as physical health. However, a study found a profound drop in teenage girls’ self-esteem (Clay, 2005). Young girls’ mental health is being affected by their poor body image. While lack of education, weight loss advertisements, and celebrities portrayal of healthy lifestyles are often underlying causes for girls’ poor body image, digital editing and media overrepresentation of underweight women are the biggest culprit.

However, Girls experience this level of dissatisfaction more frequently than boys do. They studied 25 females and had showed them pictures of thin women, after seeing these pictures, their body image had become more negative. When they were shown images of average, plus sized models, their view on their body image wasn’t as negative as it was when the thin models were shown. This study was shown to be more effective on the women that were younger than 19 years of

She claims that, “Along with body image dissatisfaction, body image distortion peaks during early adolescence, particularly among females. Body distortion clearly exists among American children and adolescents” (Skemp-Arlt 46). It is clear that there is body dissatisfaction among the young children and adolescents and it could easily turn into negative results such as eating disorders and other significant health problem. This is important to notice because this shows that there is a dissatisfaction among the children and this contributes to the children eating disorders and other significant health

Another study looked at the effects of media images on television and the effects it has on female’s perception of their body image. In this study, the participants were asked how many hours of television they watched a day, then how many of these programmes were ones with characters in that have ‘perfect’ physiques, such as 90210 etc. then the bmi of each participant was taken and was compared with how much television they watched and how much of this television contained media of body images. The results in this study suggested that the media did have an impact on body dissatisfaction. Adolescent girls based their ideal body images on characters on the television that have the ‘perfect skinny’ body image. When the participants questioned their body image after the exposure, it made them feel worse about themselves and strive to have the ‘perfect’ body image. [4]

An overview of how many girls, age group, and the distance, along with the conclusive percentage of girls that were satisfied with their own body; allows the readers to understand the sensitivity of this study. All of this information was delivered in the abstract. "Among all of these adolescent girls, 32.8% of girls had overestimated their weight, while only 4.9% of girls had underestimated their weight. Conclusions: This study concludes that desire to become thin is higher in adolescent girls, even in those who already perceived their body image as too thin." (Dixit et al. 197-202). To conclude, the results portray the percentage of girls that had overestimated their weight, as well as the percentage that had underestimated weight. This gives a statistical overview of the study conducted.

accepted in today’s world have a very negative mental attitude contributing to their compulsive behavior to be perfect. Women are enslaved to a beauty myth, chained to the false belief that our value is based on our appearance alone. (5) Women can be very vulnerable and susceptible to believing that such notions are reality, even though they know in their heart that it is not the truth. We allow ourselves to fall victim to the mind games that the media plays with us to convince our minds that thin equals good and fat equals bad. The need for the ideal body image takes its tolls on a female, mentally not just physically. When one gets caught up in the desire to please others it can distract [them] from what [they] truly feel. One who excessively pleases places her worth into the hands of other people and depends completely upon their judgment while doing their best to influence their judgment. (6) It is mentally unfavorable to depend on the critique of other for one’s own sense of self, yet it is an ongoing problem that occurs every day in many parts of the world.

The pressure a young girl places on herself to have an ideal body shape has many of them experiencing body dissatisfaction, which is a term used to express, “… the feeling that their actual physical appearance is not how they would ideally like it to be” (Kovar, 2009). This also leads to young females becoming self-conscious about their appearance. Self-consciousness can lead to depression and the “victim” will stop participating in sports or daily activities that she once enjoyed (Clay, Dittmar, & Vignoles, 2005).

Girls are taught from a young age that the key to success is beauty. The

Currently, body dissatisfaction is not uncommon among young girls. Past research results told us that current unrealistic standard of female beauty, which puts a particular emphasis on thinness, is the most likely cause of body dissatisfaction among adolescent girls (Fallon, 1990; Heinberg, 1996; Rodin, Silberstein, & Striegel-Moore, 1985). Viewing unrealistic ideal-based images can also result in increased schema activation and anger, as well as to decreased confidence (Hargreaves & Tiggemann, 2002). Many social efforts have been made to reduce women’s body dissatisfaction, such as the inclusion of diverse-sized women in women’s magazines (Zacharakis, 2009), the banning of fashion shows and advertisements featuring underweight or very underweight models (Alfano, 2006; BBC, 2012; Dittmaretal, 2009), just to name a few.