Okay – so you got this one body on this one good Earth and what? You hate it? You want to slice, dice, and botox it? Well, so does the rest of your peers! You’re definitely not alone when it comes to body image and how we feel about ourselves. In one American survey, 81% of ten-year-old girls had already dieted at least once. A recent Swedish study found that 25% of 7 year old girls had dieted to lose weight – they were already suffering from 'body-image distortion', estimating themselves to be larger than they really were. Similar studies in Japan have found that 41% of elementary school girls (some as young as 6) thought they were too fat. Even normal-weight and underweight girls want to lose weight.

As a teen, and especially if you’re a girl, you’ll likely spend more time focused on the flaws that puberty brings rather than for what puberty is: the development into a womanly body. The increase in weight and fat on your hips and thighs seem like unnatural horrible-ness as you strived to reach the unnatural standard of beauty imposed on you from an early age.

Today’s concerns with physical beauty aren’t unique in itself. Every period of history has a set of beauty concepts. In the 19th Century, being beautiful meant wearing a corset – causing breathing and digestive problems. Now we try to diet and exercise ourselves into the fashionable shape – often with even more serious consequences. Everyone today can certainly agree that the degree of concern on how we look has become an obsession with how we look due to advance technology and the rise of mass media culture.

How? 3 reasons:

• Thanks to the media, we have become accustomed to extremely rigid and uniform standards of beauty.

• TV, billboards, magazines etc mean that we see 'beautiful people' all the time, more often than members of our own family, making exceptional good looks seem real, normal and attainable.

• Standards of beauty have in fact become harder and harder to attain, particularly for women. The current media ideal of thinness for women is achievable by less than 5% of the female population.

All research to date on body image shows that women are much more critical of their appearance than men – much less likely to admire what they see in the mirror. Up to 8 out of 10 women will be dissatisfied with their reflection, and more than half may see a distorted image.

Body dissatisfaction in girls begins young – really young. We mentioned earlier than girls as young as 7 years old report had already started some form of diet to lose weight! But the age group most likely to suffer from eating disorders such as anorexia or bulimia is adolescents. Teenage girls are at the highest risk for developing an eating disorder. Think about it. In adolescents, boys do go through a short phase of relative dissatisfaction with their appearance in early adolescence, but the physical changes associated with puberty soon bring them closer to the masculine ideal –i.e. they get taller, broader in the shoulders, more muscular etc.

For girls, however, puberty only makes things worse.

The normal physical changes – increase in weight and body fat, particularly on the hips and thighs, take them further from the cultural ideal of unnatural slimness. A Harvard University study showed that up to two thirds of underweight 12 years old girls considered themselves to be too fat. By 13, at least 50% of girls are significantly unhappy about their appearance. By 14, focused, specific dissatisfactions have intensified, particularly concerning hips and thighs. By 17, only 3 out of 10 girls have not been on a diet – up to 8 out of 10 will be unhappy with what they see in the mirror.

Media Persuasions

People's reactions to their reflection in the mirror may depend on recent exposure to idealized images of physical attractiveness. Experiments have shown that people become significantly more dissatisfied with their own appearance after being shown TV ads featuring exceptionally slim and beautiful people. Control groups shown non-appearance-related ads do not change their rating of their own attractiveness.

Although many TV shows feature attractive people, ads tend to use the most idealized images, so people who've been watching a lot of CW and MTV are likely to feel less positive about their image in the mirror. Shows such as 'Baywatch' are also likely to induce a sense of dissatisfaction.

The same applies to reading fashion magazines. Recent experiments have shown that exposure to magazine photographs of super-thin models produces depression, stress, guilt, shame, insecurity, body-dissatisfaction and increased endorsement of the thin-ideal stereotype. Magazines like Vogue and Elle are banned in many eating-disorder clinics, because of their known negative effect on patients' body-image. The social vision of the "perfect" body is simply not attainable for most people. Simple biology prevents the average American woman, who weighs 140 lbs and stands 5'4" tall, from conforming to a body image idealized by fashion models who stand 5'11" tall and weigh only 117 lbs. (it's worth noting that fashion models, under intense pressure to conform to this ideal body image, are at higher than normal risk of anorexia nervosa and other eating disorders).

Most of us are aware of our society's emphasis on the importance of appearance, and we know what the socially sanctioned standards of beauty are. But not all of us accept or 'internalize' these standards: strong-minded individuals who reject current standards are more likely to have a positive body-image.