Get real women on our front pages! (Eating disorders - how are they caused?)

Member Name: Emily_09

Product:	Eating disorders - how are they caused?
Date:	28/09/09 (69 review reads)
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Two young girls are walking down a street. One girl says to the other girl, "When I grow up I want to be a size zero", the other girl replies "No I'm going to be a size zero!"

Believe it or not, no longer in Britain do six year olds dream of becoming the queen or the prime minister, a fairy or Santa; the newest craze sweeping our nation is; "I want to be a size zero".

Once upon a time, fat was fashionable. The voluptuous Victorians used their weight to indicate their vast wealth, only the fattest women were chosen to be muses in some of the most famous paintings and, in Tudor times, the man who ruled over the entire country and was allegedly divine in the eyes of the church, was fat.

Now, however, it's a very different kettle of fish. Everywhere we look, in every glossy magazine, on every blaring billboard, we are bombarded with images of the 'perfect body'. So how do we get to be 'perfect' like the bodies of these celebrities that we worship and lust after just before we tuck into that second lettuce leaf? It's easy. All we have to do is starve ourselves to the point of passing out, spend every single spare hour in our already busy schedules at the gym and buy ridiculously over sized expensive sacks to make ourselves look even tinier. Easy.

Think back to the last meal you ate. Maybe you admit to having succumbed to the trend and only consumed the minimal amount of those criminal calories that have become the bane of so many people's lives. Or do you disagree? Maybe you think that the burger and extra fries that you so devilishly consumed make you exempt from all those weight obsessed skeletons that haunt our catwalks and perhaps more disturbingly, our high streets. I'd be willing to bet, however, that not a single one of you has never thought about the consequences on your waistline of eating that second slice of cake, the sixth custard crème or that extra helping of sugar in your coffee?

That's not to say we shouldn't be health conscious, we don't need to all be overweight before having a healthy attitude towards food. If we all lived active lifestyles, ate a variety of different foods and exercised sensibly, life would be much simpler. But what happens when the obsession with food and diet takes over? Last year in Britain over 7,000 teenagers died as a result of eating disorders, some whose bodies simply gave up from the constant deprivation of forbidden food while others, who had fought the soul destroying disease that invaded their minds for years, no longer saw a reason to live.

These days anorexia is extremely common in young, impressionable, vulnerable adolescents, striving to achieve that 'perfect' image. It is more than likely that some of you can relate to personal battles with food and what is most worrying is that these problems are dangerously becoming more and more common.

The media portrays the idea that glamorous is synonomous with being skinny; the slimmer you are, the better you look. In the celebrity world, image is everything. Lindsay Lohan, Paris Hilton, Eva Longoria; all famous, all beautiful, all skinny. How many of you have been flicking through the pages of a newspaper in your lunch break and seen the headline 'Size 16 model wins Miss World' or something along the same lines? I didn't think so. Ribcages, protruding bones and lollipop heads on stick thin bodies are on every page but even more shocking are the number of young people whose deaths could have so easily been avoided if they did not feel so pressurised to be a certain size.

In 2006, 22 year old model Luisel Ramos collapsed whilst going for a costume change shortly before a catwalk show. She died almost immediately and her father claimed that she had been fasting for days after being told that she could 'make it big' if she lost weight. Gone are the days that are a distant memory for many of us when teenager's main priorities were socialising and having a good time. Gone are the days when the foods we ate were the least of our worries and in their place are miserable times where an army of young women are constantly searching, struggling and striving for that perfect body image, an irretrievable rainbow.

But what is perfect? Nobody is perfect, so why is the image of skinny celebrities we see so much portrayed as the ultimate goal? Is it wrong to be different if we are healthy? Should we feel guilty for putting on that extra little bit of Christmas weight?

There is simply no winning in the world of fashion. If a woman is slightly overweight she is labelled as 'fat' and and 'obese' but on the other hand if she is naturally slim, she is automatically 'anorexic'.

So is there such a thing as perfect? Would it not be much easier to try, as hard as it may be, to accept our own and each others bodies for what they are? Would it not be much simpler for celebrities to return to being famous because they can sing, act or are unique in their natural beauty, rather than being praised for how much their bones protrude this week?

I'm not saying that all eating disorders are caused by the media, after suffering myself I know how easy it is to fall into a cycle of becoming obsessed with limiting what you eat and feeling a sense of control that makes you unable to see what those around you do.

All I'm asking is that the media, and us as individuals try to throw away our theories about the perfect body shape, swallow our jealously of the celebrities who seem so much slimmer than us and concentrate on the important parts of life. It's time to move on from this obsession with appearance and start to do what we are meant to do in life...live.

Thankyou for reading. This piece was what I wrote for my English coursework but I wanted to share it as it's a topic I feel really strongly about.

Summary: Change is needed to help young girls