Erstellt am: 12. 11. 2010 - 16:24 Uhr

Body Image

It’s time to get back to normal...

I’d like to know what the hell happened to "normal" when it comes to weight and body image.

There’s no shortage of news about increasing rates of obesity and all the associated health issues. In Austria, 40 percent of the adult population is overweight or obese and for children and teenagers between 6 and 15 the figure is 25 percent. The United Nations got so concerned about diabetes, which is partly linked to increasing obesity, that a couple of years ago it declared a resolution on the disease to highlight “a growing epidemic that threatens to overwhelm healthcare services and undermine economies worldwide - especially in developing countries.”

At the other extreme the image of what is “ideal” or “attractive” isn’t exactly healthy, either. Critics accuse the fashion industry with its super skinny supermodels of contributing to eating disorders like anorexia nervosa and bulimia. In Austria, it’s estimated that 200,000 girls and young women have suffered from an eating disorder at least once. By the way, 90 to 97% of those affected by such disorders are girls and young women. According to experts, the media image of the ideal weight goes beyond the fashion industry. Most sensible people realise that the haute-couture world of the catwalk is not what we normal women should be aspiring to, but have you noticed that nearly all the women who appear on TV as presenters, commentators or experts are also pretty slim? Unhealthily so, says Dr Aric Sigman, who’s researched the issue and who coined the term “perma-rexic”, in other words permanently underweight, to describe these women. The scary part is that this is not the fairy-tale world of fashion models – these women are real-world, educated, intelligent, articulate, role models.

Of course, you could argue that it’s stupid to succumb to the pressure of images in the media, but the truth is, it’s not that easy. Dr Sigman has reviewed research in different countries and argues that women’s brains are programmed biologically to respond. Scientists have found that the part of the brain associated with self-loathing and depression becomes active when women are shown pictures of themselves which have been edited to make them look larger, or when they are shown words such as “fat”. For female humans in primitive times, competition to secure a mate also meant assessing what was found attractive by the males, and comparing themselves to their rivals. Sound familiar? The problem is that in today's world, we are no longer comparing ourselves to a handful of other - normal - women, but with an explosion of abnormal images in the media. So we are "competing" with an illusion. Ironically, the research also confirmed (we’ve been told this before but it’s good to have experts say it) that what men find attractive, has nothing to do with what the images on our screens are telling us, and involves a lot more extra volume on our hips and bottoms.

This Saturday's Reality Check Special concludes FM4 week on Body Issues and will be taking a look at Body Image.