Some close friends and I just had a discussion that led us to a scary conclusion: society has an eating disorder. Society's obsession with thinness, food, weight, fitness, and appearance in general is reaching an unprecedented extremity. So while not every woman in the world has a full-blown eating disorder, chances are that their beliefs and priorities have been influenced in some way by society's eating disorder. Signs of society's eating disorder are apparent in the fashion industry, the fitness industry, in the magazines at the grocery store checkout, in the reality TV shows on cable, the conversations between female characters on sitcoms, and in nearly every corner of the internet.
For example, if you try opening up a Pinterest page and clicking on “Health and Fitness,” I think you'll be surprised at how many “thinspiration” (images of women with very low body weight designed as motivators for weight loss) and “fitspiration” (similar to thinspiration but focused on exercise and getting “ripped”). Images like these encourage extremism in diet and exercise, deliberately encouraging the viewer to push their bodies to the limits to achieve “perfection.” Let's take this image for example:
How damaging is the perspective that this image is promoting? The message is to ignore your body's natural ways of telling you how much it can take. While there is a healthy way to improve physical fitness by building endurance and strength, fighting your body can have serious physical and mental consequences. These include injury, exhaustion, and an increased risk for exercise addiction or eating disorders. Unfortunately, society's standard of fitness is moving way past the mark of healthy living and dangerously closer to the realms of obsession. Society's standard is disordered.
It appears that even the folks at Pinterest are recognizing the unhealthy and dangerous trend that is taking place on their website. When I searched “thinspiration” to find example images for this article, this is what popped up at the top of the page:
While I'm grateful for the important warning and information, it's sad that it has to be posted.
Don't get me wrong—not everyone who is “fit” has an unhealthy perspective. There is a female fitness instructor named Tammy who works at a rec center in my hometown. I've taken weight training classes from her and loved them because she never makes negative comments about weight, fat, or eating. She's perfectly comfortable with telling stories about a delicious doughnut she had on a date with her husband, or how great it was to play in the backyard with her grandchildren instead of going for a run. During the class, she encourages each participant to protect themselves against injury by listening to their bodies. Tammy loves to exercise and she is very fit, but fitness is not the center of her life. Society could stand to take a leaf from Tammy's book.
It can be a challenge to not allow society's disordered perspectives to influence our own lives. The next time you pause to see if anyone at the party is watching you reach for a second piece of pizza, or the next time you feel guilty for skipping a day at the gym, or even the next time you feel tempted to entertain a negative thought about your body, ask yourself, “Am I letting society's eating disorder set standards for my life?” “Am I submitting to any of society's distorted ideas about fitness and health?”
Remember that you are free to make your own choices about food, exercise, clothing, and how you talk and feel about your body. If eating a second slice of pizza is what you really want to do, then go ahead and eat it. If taking a break from the gym will help you find time to make your day satisfying, then do it. Or maybe you do want to go to the gym, not because you'll feel guilty if you don't, but because you'll feel good if you do. Be honest with yourself, both in distinguishing between your own healthy and unhealthy thoughts, and society's healthy and unhealthy messages. Just because society has an eating disorder, doesn't mean you can't challenge those beliefs in your own life.
Even if you have suffered or are currently suffering from an eating disorder, remember that you have the same opportunity to challenge those beliefs. The strangling grip of an eating disorder isn't something that has to hold you for forever. In my own recovery from an eating disorder, I've felt at times that healing was impossible, because once I finally was able to dispute my own disordered thoughts and actions, the same things would pop up in what seemed like every social interaction or any contact I had with media. My solution has been to dispute the wrong and seek out the right. There are a lot of ways to find and internalize a healthy perspective on your relationship with your body. Seek out the things that help you feel peace with food, with your body, with others, and with yourself. I won't claim to be perfect in that respect, or to have reached the point where I feel one hundred percent great one hundred percent of the time, but I can say that I have experienced positive changes that I didn't think were possible. Society's eating disorder doesn't have to prevent you from overcoming your own.
For more information and other perspectives, check out these resources:
“The Body, a Sacred Gift” by Diane L. Spangler, PhD
- This Ensign article written by a BYU professor of clinical psychology invites us to “regard our bodies in the Lord's way rather than in the world's way.”
Goodbye Ed, Hello Me, by Jenni Schaefer
- Jenni Schaefer, an author and motivational speaker who has recovered from an eating disorder, talks about recovery and Societal ED, or the voice of society's eating disorder.
- A blog by Dr. Stacey Rosenfeld, a clinical psychologist, who discusses the norm of an unhealthy fixation on weight, food, and shape.
Article by Jessica Croft
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