Thinness: The Obsession Of American Women

Under society’s customs for decades, young women have found themselves immersed in the pressure and anticipation to have exemplary bodies. Nearly every young woman prefers to be slim, have a perfectly shaped body, that is beautified by applying pounds of makeup to their face but does not appear ridiculously overdone. Who’s responsible for these measures imposed on young women? When a young girl picks up the model on the cover of Vogue being called flawless, naturally it’s easy for her to then aspire to be a real-life imitation of the that model. These companies produce magazine covers shown with girls’ images daily. As if keeping the perfect body wasn’t hard enough, our culture also forces girls into the forever expanding world of composition, however, body image is a surging subject for young girls. Advertisements and pictures of lean female models are all over. Young women are measured and perplexed by their physical appearances with attire intended to raise their physical structures; social media, magazines, the society, marketing campaigns, advertisements, and the fashion gurus add to a strand of excellence.

Women today are not fat like the media portrays them to be; the human race itself has changed and now all people are bigger than they used to be. However, the media makes claims that woman are over weight, when in reality the woman are the average size for this time period.

(4) Knapp describes how” the average American woman is bombarded with ads on a daily basis… which shows a controlled appetite, prerequisite for slenderness, connotes beauty, desirability, and worthiness.” (8) The daily reminders from society resonates in a woman’s psyche which leads to anxiety towards hunger. The anxiety that women feel leads to an insatiable desire to be thin no matter the cost because of fear of being fat, and the negative connotation associated with being fat.

Eating disorders effecting American women have been on the rise in recent year. The alarming trend of increasing cases of these psychological disorders has sparked intellectual inquiry into their shared features. The rising amount of societal pressures that many women around the country feel have caused a lot of women to turn to food as a coping mechanism. Whether it is control exhorted over food or eating as a means to feel numb, women look to food to make themselves feel a certain way. Food, in modern culture, represents much more than just as a means of nourishing ones body. How individuals use food as a copping mechanism has in part lead to the exploitation of food. Three major eating disorders; Anorexia, Bulimia, and Binge Eating

The average American woman is 5’4” and weighs 140 pounds, while the average American model is 5’11” and weighs 117 pounds (Chojnacki, 2017). Those models’ digitally enhanced pictures are published in magazines, posted online, and shown on television. Individuals scroll past filtered images of the “thin ideal”, flip through the pages and images of magazines as they stand in check out lines, and are drawn to advertisements of beautiful, happy, and skinny people. All of these encounters happen several times daily without even thinking twice about the message that is being sent. The enormous audience that the media can now reach due to advancing technology is both a blessing and a curse. Technology has allowed the public to connect with people thousands of miles away at the touch of a button and

Its lunchtime and you feel like you need something to fill you up and you need something fast so you go to your favorite fast food chain and get the greasiest meal possible because it tastes good, but that good taste is leading you down a road of death. The choices we make for our lunch or breakfast or even dinner will have a lasting effect on our health but we still go for that one dollar McDonalds burger that tastes really good and is so cheap that it would be an inconvenience to buy that five dollar McDonalds salad that would actually provide a healthy dose of nutrition to your body. Obesity can cause many lasting effects such as diabetes, high blood pressure, heart disease, joint problems, cancer and psychological effects. Today’s American society is at a very dangerous risk of death that they don’t even think of from all the food we eat that has no nutritional value to our bodies. Travis Stork, M.D stated, “Our food choices are so dangerously unhealthy that eating-related diseases send twice as many people

In the last 10 years, 12.7 million of adolescents in the United States aged between 12 to 19 years old are obese. Obesity is generally caused by eating too much and moving too little. When teenagers consume high amounts of energy from their diet, through fats and sugars, but do not burn off the energy through exercise and physical activity, much of the surplus energy is then stored by the body as fat. An obese person has accumulated so much body fat that it might have an adverse effect on their health. If a person's body mass is at least 20% higher than it should be, the person is considered obese. Many teenagers in the United States have gained weight for a variety of reasons, some have accumulated so much body fat that it might have a negative

Fats in the human body are stored in cells known as adipocytes. Adipocytes, also known as lipocytes and fat cells, are the cells that primarily compose adipose tissue, specialized in storing energy as fat. Fat can also be stored as “droplets” in skeletal muscle cells that hold about 2,000-3,000 kilocalories. Some fat even flows freely through the blood in a human body. Fat is one of the three macronutrients. Macronutrients are substance required in large quantities in a living organism. Other than fat, proteins and carbohydrates are macronutrients. Women can carry more fat than women. The fat in a woman represents around 18%-20% of her body weight. The fat in a man only represents about 10%-15% of his body weight. There is one main reason for this. That reason being

This Jesuit value entails, sharing gifts, pursuing justice, and having concern for the poor and marginalized. Working as a community to help those around you through the good and bad times. Having special concern for those in need. men and women who will live not for themselves, but for the service to God, to make those that suffer have the support they need in order to get back on their feet.

Beauty is a cruel mistress. Every day, Americans are bombarded by images of flawless women with perfect hair and smooth skin, tiny waists and generous busts. They are presented to us draped in designer clothing, looking sultry or perky or anywhere in between. And although the picture itself is alluring, the reality behind the visage is much more sinister. They are representations of beauty ideals, sirens that silently screech “this is what a woman is supposed to look like!” Through means of media distribution and physical alteration, technology has created unrealistic beauty ideals, resulting in distorted female body images.

Recently, model, singer, and actress Zendaya did a photo shoot and upon the pictures being released she made an Instagram post revealing how the photo was retouched with lighting and camera filters to manipulate the image. She made a statement stating, “These are the things that make women self conscious, that create the unrealistic ideals of beauty that we have. Anyone who knows who I am knows I stand for honest and pure self love.” With that, Zendaya took it upon herself to release the real picture. In response, the magazine took a swift step to pull the magazine and have the images restored to their original, natural state. If models and celebrities are not really as thin and flawless as the images we see of them, how can anyone possibly fulfill the beauty ideal that they represent? In her book The Beauty Myth, Naomi Wolf criticizes the media for the flawless and unrealistic illusions created by makeup artists and photographers, arguing that such unobtainable perfection invites young women to compare their unimproved reality to physical ideals that do not really exist (CITATION). According to one study, 69% of girls claimed that magazine models influence their concept of the perfect body shape (CITATION 3). The pervasive acceptance of this unrealistic body type creates an impractical standard that is damaging to the body images of

Throughout history, women have proved their intellectual strength. Whether it be gaining the right to vote and breaking the gender barrier from 1848-1920, or standing-up against racial injustice, women have been some of the most influential people. However, even after all this, women still have an increased desire to be thin because it is deemed “prettier” and “more desirable.” 40% of normal weight adolescent females regard themselves as “fat” and aspire to a thinner body, but “do not have time to watch what they eat or exercise” (Wade, Keski-Rahkonen, & Hudson, 2011). It appears that the pursuit of thinness may have emerged as a way through which women could compete amongst themselves and demonstrate self-control. Yet, in turning to

Being human comes with a list of inevitable mechanisms; developing fevers, throwing up, and sweating are all natural processes human experience. One nature of the human body is the tendency to gain weight. Due to this, many of us pursue the act of dieting in order to lose the weight gained. Society pushes for losing weight as “traditionally, good health and a leaner body are the motivational factors emphasized in public health campaigns and information materials” (Sabinsky) but there are many motivators that push us to lose weight. Many individuals experience low self esteem, especially in lieu of weight, and it’s interesting to understand how weight is perceived differently across genders. Delving into a woman’s self esteem issues and focusing

Millions of women every day are bombarded with the media’s idea of the “perfect” body. These unrealistic images are portrayed in women’s magazines all over the country. The message being sent to women is that they are not pretty or skinny enough. The average American woman is 5’4” and weighs 140 pounds, while the average American model is 5’11” and weighs 117 pounds. Annually, magazine companies spend billions of dollars on diet and exercise advertisements to put in their magazines. Magazines sell body dissatisfaction to their readers through unrealistic images of

We are constantly surrounded by images of the “perfect” woman. She is tall, thin and beautiful. She rarely looks older than 25, has a flawless body, and her hair and clothes are always perfect. She is not human. She is often shown in pieces – a stomach, a pair of legs, a beautifully made up eye or mouth. Our culture judges women, and women judge themselves, against this standard. It is forgotten that “beauty pornography”, as Wolf says, focuses on underweight models that are usually 15 to 20 years old. Flaws, wrinkles and other problems are airbrushed out of the picture.