Heidi Brandt

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People are influenced by what they see in the media every day. One thing that has a huge
impact on people, especially women, is the idea of body image and what we should look like. I
know that the media can be very influential. While I was a senior in high school, some things
happened that made me not have an appetite for a while. After a while, I realized that I was
losing weight and looking more like my skinny friends and people were telling me how good I
looked, so I continued to not eat for a while. Altogether, I purged food for about a month. I
took nibbles of food when my parents made me, but if I wasn't being told to eat, I didn't. I lost
almost 30 pounds and was pretty unhealthy. I'm really thankful that that only lasted as long as it
did and I started eating again.
Why should you all care about the influence of the media on body image? Maybe it
doesn't directly affect you, but it affects so many people around you every day. It influences the
way women, as well as young girls, look at themselves. Think about your younger siblings or
the daughters you might have someday. The media has a huge affect on the way that girls as
young as ten years old, probably even younger, view themselves.
Mass media has a huge affect on body image and how women view themselves. The
media doesn't affect just adults, but women of all ages. The media has unrealistic views of what
beauty is and that has an incredibly negative effect on a lot of people. The media has clearly
defined what beauty is according to their standards. Because they have a very distinct definition
of what beauty is, many women are unhappy with themselves and their bodies. Because of the
definitions from the media, many women are resorting to eating disorders. Society telling us
how we need to look to be beautiful is wrong. We need to stand up against societal norms and
learn to accept and love ourselves the way we were created.
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The media idealizes thinness. If you aren't thin, you aren't "attractive." The media
frequently shows us pictures of models. According to a study done by Kasey Serdar at
Westminster College, these models are typically tall and thin with a tubular body shape. The
models that the media constantly shows pictures of almost always fulfill these unrealistic
expectations. They make it seem like this is how women should look. Because all of the models
they use have the tubular body type, they make it seem like it's normal for women to look like
that, when in reality, most women physically can't look like those models because of the way
their bodies are naturally shaped (Serdar, N.D.).
It is unrealistic for women to think they can look like the models because many of the
models used on TV or in advertisements are well below what is considered a healthy body
weight. According to Rader Programs in 2014, most runway models meet the Body Mass Index
criteria for anorexia. Today the average model weighs 23% less than the average woman.
Because of this, the message is sent to women that in order to be beautiful, you must be
unhealthy and this is so untrue.
Since the media sets such unrealistic expectations for women and the way that they look
and emphasize it so much, Rader Programs states that 97% of women have at least one moment a
day where they hate their bodies, 75% of women consider themselves to be overweight, four out
of five women are unhappy with their appearance, and seven out of ten women feel angrier or
more depressed after looking at images of models.
Grown women are not the only ones that are negatively affected by the media. Young
girls and adolescents are also affected. The previously mentioned studies done by Rader
Programs found that 81% of ten year old girls fear being fat and 42% of first through third grade
girls wish that they were thinner. They also found that most teenage girls are more afraid of
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gaining weight than they are of getting cancer, losing their parents, or nuclear war (Rader
Programs, 2014).
As you can tell, the female mind is very influenced by what it sees in the media. In an
article by Wendy Spettigue and Katharine A. Henderson on the US National Library of Medicine
and National Institutes of Health websites, it's stated that 83% of adolescent girls read fashion
magazines for an average of 4.3 hours a week. These magazines have a huge impact on these
young girls in the process of identity development. In surveys taken of women who read these
magazines, it was found that the number one wish for girls ages eleven to seventeen is to be able
to lose weight and keep it off. In another survey, middle aged women were asked what they
would like to changed most about any aspect of their lives. Over half of the women asked said
that they would want to be thinner, even though less than 25% of the women were overweight
(Henderson and Spettigue, 2004).
Because of the way the media portrays women and beauty, that image is how everyone
starts to view beauty. We all praise people who look like what the media tells us to look like and
we criticize those who don't look like the models we frequently see. Because of the judgment
from the media and other people, women constantly feel the need to change the way they look in
order to be attractive. They feel that they need to look like the models that they see in
advertisements and on TV. A lot of times, this results in unhealthy diet habits, rather than
healthy weight loss. According to the National Association of Anorexia Nervosa and Associated
Disorders in 2014, 25% of college aged women engaged in purging as a weight loss technique.
This means that rather than eating healthy amounts of food, watching what they eat or
exercising, they just don't eat at all. Also, over half of teenage girls in the US use purging or
other unhealthy weight control behaviors such as skipping meals, fasting, or vomiting. This is
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dangerous to their health because their bodies then don't get the nutrients they need. Also, these
techniques lead to eating disorders like anorexia and bulimia (ANAD, 2014).
In the media right now, there are a lot of images that promote and inspire weight loss. It's
an idea called "thinspiration" and it's supposed to inspire people to be thin. The goals of these
images are to inspire the dieters to persist in continued weight loss efforts. They emphasize
being extremely thin and use images of obese people as a scare tactic to encourage weight loss.
They encourage people to set weight loss goals, whether they're healthy goals or not. When
people follow through with their unhealthy weight loss goals, it could result in eating disorders.
We should be encouraging people to be healthy, not encouraging them to pursue unhealthy
lifestyles.
We should all begin to encourage healthy lifestyles. According to John Rader with
Ragan's Health Care Communication News in 2012, some social media sites, such as Pinterest
and Instagram have banned all "thinspiration" content because they don't want to promote eating
disorders. Those social media sites also think that the media as a whole needs to change their
standard of beauty so that more people don't end up with media-triggered eating disorders
(Rader, 2012).
We need to be doing what Instagram and Pinterest are doing. That is, encouraging
people to love themselves, rather than striving to look like all of the models that are portrayed in
the media because those models aren't healthy. We should encourage people to be healthy, not
encourage them to lose unhealthy amounts of weight. We shouldn't look down on people because
of how they look and how much they weigh. The more we criticize and judge others, the more
we're going to make others feel terrible about the way they look. It will also make us recognize
the things that we don't like about ourselves. When we focus on the things we don't like about
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ourselves, that gives other people the right to tell us how to fix those "problems." We shouldn't
pick people apart.
In the Bible, in Genesis 1:27, it says, "So God created mankind in his own image, in the
image of God he created them; male and female he created them." Psalm 139:13-14 says, "For
you (God) created my inmost being; you knit me together in my mother's womb. I praise you
because I am fearfully and wonderfully made." In Ephesians 2:10, it says that we are God's
handiwork (NIV Bible, 2011). We were all created by God, and he is a God who doesn't make
mistakes. We shouldn't be worried about how we look in the eyes of others and in the
perspective of the media. We should see ourselves as something beautiful that God created for a
reason.
What can we do, you may ask? We can overcome the negative impacts. We can tell
ourselves and others that a person, that person being the media in this case, can't control us. We
don't have to allow them to own a part of our minds that is able to negatively influence us. Even
though we're around it all the time and can't really escape what it tells us, we don't have to live
by the rules and standards that it sets for us. The media will constantly come up with new
standards so, no matter how much we try to alter ourselves to fit their standards, we'll never be
happy. Since it doesn't guarantee happiness, why hold ourselves to those standards. If we
channeled our energy to other things, rather than obsessing over our appearances, we would feel
so much better about ourselves. We should encourage others to do these things, too, as well as
doing them ourselves. The media can't control our minds if we don't allow it to.
The media has a huge affect on so many people's lives. When it comes to body image, it
has an incredibly negative influence on people, especially women and young girls. The
expectations that the media has for women's appearances are so unattainable and not realistic. If
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we could just find a way to not let the media influence us, women in general would be a lot
happier and healthier. We should be encouraging others to love themselves and their bodies
rather than tearing everyone down and telling them that they're not good enough. Stop letting the
media control your mind and love yourself for who you are.

Heidi Brandt
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Bibliography

Berninger, Lauren. "Stop Blaming the Media for Our Body Image Issues." The Huffington Post.
TheHuffingtonPost.com, 22 Jan. 2014. Web. 12 Oct. 2014.
<http://www.huffingtonpost.com/lauren-berninger/stop-blaming-the-media-
fo_b_4633388.html>.

Densing, J.M., and E. E. Hubbard. "What Is Thinspiration?" WiseGeek. Conjecture, 15 Sept.
2014.
Web. 9 Oct. 2014. <http://www.wisegeek.com/what-is-thinspiration.htm>.

"Eating Disorders Statistics." ANAD. National Association of Anorexia Nervosa and Associated
Disorders, 2014. Web. 10 Oct. 2014. <http://www.anad.org/get-information/about-eating-
disorders/eating-disorders-statistics/>.

Life Application Study Bible. NIV ed. Grand Rapids, MI: Zondervan, 2011. Print.

"Media Influence." Eating Disorders and the Media. Rader Programs, 2014. Web. 10 Oct. 2014.
<http://www.raderprograms.com/causes-statistics/media-eating-disorders.html>.

Rader, Jonathon. "Does the Media Cause Eating Disorders?" Health Care Communications.
N.p., 28
Aug. 2012. Web. 14 Oct. 2014.
<http://www.healthcarecommunication.com/Main/Articles/Does_the_media_cause_eatin
g_di
sorders_9417.aspx>.

Serdar, Kasey L. "Female Body Image and the Mass Media: Perspectives on How Women
Internalize the Ideal Beauty Standard." Westminster College: A Private Comprehensive
Liberal Arts College in Salt Lake City, UT, Offering Undergraduate and Graduate
Degrees in
Liberal Arts and Professional Programs, including Business, Nursing, Education and
Communication. Westminster College, n.d. Web. 10 Oct. 2014.
<http://www.westminstercollege.edu/myriad/index.cfm?parent=...&detail=4475&content
=479
5>.

Spettigue, Wendy, and Katherine A. Henderson. "Eating Disorders and the Role of the
Media." National Center for Biotechnology Information. U.S. National Library of
Medicine, 25
July 2004. Web. 10 Oct. 2014.
<http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC2533817/>.