I have to admit, I never realized how pervasive my issues with body image were until I began to plan out this blog post. When I tried to recall any time that I felt negatively about my body, and I was flooded with a ton of not-so-fun memories.
Here is a list of some distinct memories I have that related to body image:
- When I was in the 3rd grade, I tried dieting for the first time. I only ate a salad for lunch, much to the dismay of my friends. I told them I was fat, so I had to eat salad to lose weight, just like my mom always talked about.
- When I first started taking Adderall in 4th grade, my parents tried to bribe me to eat more because I lost a lot of weight as a side effect of the medication. When my parents pointed out that I had lost weight, I replied, “Isn’t that a good thing?
- When I was 11, I told my friends that one day I would dye my hair blonde and wear contacts that made my eyes look blue. When someone asked me why, I said something like, “I can’t be ugly for forever.”
- I remember a screaming match my dad and I had when I was 11 or 12 about SlimFast shakes. He wanted me to eat something with the shake because he was concerned that I wasn’t eating enough. I was afraid if I ate something with the SlimFast shake I would gain weight.
- Starting in middle school, I obsessively read Self, Seventeen, and other magazines, so I could try the latest and greatest diets and exercises.
All of this occurred between the ages of 9 and 17, when I was, at best, a healthy weight or, at worst, about 10 pounds underweight.
3 out of 4 girls feel depressed, guilty, and shameful after spending three minutes leafing through a fashion magazine.
This obsession with image did not stop at 17. I was (and still am) proud of myself because I got over the anxiety of going anywhere without makeup, which was something my mom ingrained in me early on. I got to the point where I felt more confident without makeup than I did with makeup. However, earlier this year, I made it my goal to lose most of the weight I gained in college, but not for health reasons. I wanted to fit into my favorite pair of jeans and be skinny. I dieted, exercised, weighed myself every morning, and proudly announced every pound that I lost. You know, the kind of behavior that borders disordered eating.
There were many factors that led to this obsession with image, but two that I am most concerned about. First, I read too many magazines as a child. The photoshopped images are not good for anyone, as they make women strive for unrealistic beauty standards and lead men to judge women by these unattainable standards. I should not have had access to Self and Seventeen when I was 11 years old because I was more impressionable and less able to separate fiction from reality. I did not know about photoshop, so I thought the women in the magazines actually looked like the way to did in the pictures, therefore I wanted to look like an anorexic model.
Second, my mom and many women in my life modelled many unhealthy behaviors to me. Dieting, obsessing about weight, teaching me that I don’t look good unless I have makeup on are behaviors and beliefs I learned from important women in my life. I truly believed as a child women were supposed to complain about their weight, diet, and wear pounds of makeup. To my mom’s credit, she had a lot of issues related to body image stemming from teasing growing up, and I don’t see her modelling these behaviors to my sister now.
“You can’t be what you can’t see.”
This is one reason why I related to the Miss Representation documentary and have become so passionate about the Keep It Real campaign. I don’t want my sister, cousins, and other women who are close to me to grow up believing that they are inadequate or not beautiful because the media is showing them fake models and telling them they should try to look like that. I want women to be free of the pressures of being skinny, plucked, tan, and toned and work on being smart, accomplished, and well-rounded. I want to see a female leader not get criticized for going on TV without makeup. I want female politicians to be judged by their ideas not what outfit they are wearing or who wants to sleep with them.
The media diminishes women by focusing on our looks. It is time to tell them that we are over it. Doing away with Photoshop is a great place to start.
If you want to get involved, check out the Keep It Real campaign. (I would suggest watching the Miss Representation documentary, too. It is available on iTunes and Amazon.)
Also, start by making changes in your own lives. I have stopped dieting, I exercise when I have time, and any time I make a negative comment about my body I either list something cool or interesting that I did that day (at work or in my personal time) or something I can do with my body (a yoga pose or run a mile).
You have to be the change you want to see. As Gloria Steinem said in Miss Representation, “If you or I downgrade on how we look or complain about our looks, if we remember that a girl is watching us and that’s what she’s learning.”
I will leave you with this awesome spoof commercial: Fotoshop by Adobe.
Peace, Love, and Keep It Real.
peace and love kaleidoscope 