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It’s no secret that women seem to care much more about their appearance than men. This truth is perpetuated through the media and advertisements and exemplified by the society we are accustomed to. The average woman sees about 500 advertisements per day, and roughly half of the advertisements aimed at female viewers speak about physical attractiveness or use beauty as a product appeal. However, most images of women we see in the media are false. They are photoshopped or tampered with in some other way. Constantly seeing these false images is killing women’s confidence, self-esteem, and appreciation of her own beauty. This assault on a woman’s natural appearance has caused women of all age groups psychological distress from the pressure to be perfect or an ideal. Additionally, these advertisements have conditioned society to both hate and fear fat. This leads to dissatisfaction with one’s own body image and a phobia of becoming fat, and can ultimately manifest into an eating disorder.

Body image is how you picture yourself: how you see yourself in the mirror, and how you see yourself in your mind. Several different factors contribute to this picture, including how your family reacts to and feels about your body, how you feel about your gender, accidents and illnesses, and your ethnicity and community. Lastly, the media--things like television, magazines, commercials, movies, and billboards--significantly contributes to the development of body image. Negative body image has become a widespread phenomenon. Surveys and studies have found that body dissatisfaction is disturbingly high. And it has been said that some teenagers don’t realize that it isn’t normal to hate your body.

Influences from the media are arguably the most significant factor when developing body image. The media feeds us false and deprecating ideals and messages that harm us. The average model is seven inches taller and weighs 23 pounds less than the average woman. Obviously, being bombarded by images of the “ideal” woman is affecting how women feel about their own bodies, and it is making women go through drastic measures in order to achieve “perfection.”

However, a young woman between the ages of 18 and 34 only has a 7% chance of being as slender as a catwalk model, and she only has a 1% chance of being as thin as a supermodel—and catwalk models and supermodels are the exact type of women who are portrayed in magazines and other forms of media.

Society punishes what it considers the unattractive, unappealing, or undesirable. A new study found that women who are of average weight or classify as obese earn significantly less money than their skinnier counterparts. This study also concluded that the standards for men in the workforce are opposite. Men who are overweight or obese make significantly more than those who are underweight. Since when did the ability to perform one’s job well depend on how appealing that person might be? In this sense, society rewards what it considers attractive, appealing, or desirable.

On top of attractive or appealing people earning significantly more than their “unattractive or unappealing” counterparts do, our brains project positive qualities onto women (and men) who we consider attractive. This is called the “what is beautiful is good stereotype.” We perceive these people as more sociable, happier, and more successful than unattractive people, and these expectations often serve as a self-fulfilling prophecy. To be successful, one must be attractive, and in order to be attractive, one must be what the society deems acceptable.

 The combination of media influence and society’s encouragement of the media ideal has created chaos: A world where women hate their bodies and themselves, and they strive for a “better” body. Research has shown that dieting with the goal to achieve the ideal figure portrayed by the media plays a key role in triggering eating disorders. Girls as young as five have expressed concern that they are too fat, or that they fear becoming fat. The number one wish for girls ages 11 to 17 is to be thinner. One-third of high school aged girls believe they are overweight, and 60% of high school aged girls are trying to lose weight, regardless of if they need to or not.

Disturbances in body image and the fear of becoming fat leads to preoccupation with image and weight, and that in turn leads to eating disordered behaviors. Many recognize behaviors such as starving oneself, bingeing, and purging as disordered eating behaviors, but they fail to realize that activities such as taking laxatives, exercising excessively, severely restricting one’s caloric intake, fasting, and neglecting certain food groups also identify as disordered eating behaviors. This combination of image preoccupation and disordered eating behaviors in addition to media and societal influence is the perfect equation for developing an eating disorder. Fifteen percent of young women have “substantially disordered eating attitudes and behaviors.” Almost ten million adolescent girls and women struggle with eating disorders and borderline eating conditions. Eating disorders are also prevalent in men, but less so than women, where 10 – 15% of anorexia nervosa or bulimia nervosa sufferers being male. However, because eating disorders are portrayed as “women’s diseases,” men are less likely to seek treatment.

Body image preoccupation leads to dieting, and most professionals agree that dieting precedes the onset of most cases of eating disorders. Preoccupation with image and disordered eating behaviors lead to the development of eating disorders in the same way that constantly being around smokers and beginning to smoke lead to addiction to cigarettes. The more one dwells on this “ideal” body type, the more prone they are to developing an eating disorder.

There is a misconception that fat people are inherently unhealthy. You may hear someone making a snide comment about someone’s weight and backing it up with, “I’m just worried about their health.” The media and even doctors lead us to believe that if you are overweight, you are unhealthy, and losing weight will make you healthy again. The idea that skinny means healthy has been drilled in our minds our entire lives. However, much research contradicts these beliefs. For example, it has been proven that being five pounds underweight is more dangerous than being 75 pounds overweight.

Dieting has even been shown to be downright ineffective. Studies are showing that a focus on weight as a health criterion is often misdirected and even harmful. Even if dieters lose weight, after two years they often regain their weight and lose their health improvements. Those who have been taught to focus on health rather than weight are more likely to sustain their health improvements after two years.

The reality is: although weights have increased within the past 40 years, mortality rates have decreased. Most studies agree that being “overweight” is actually beneficial to longevity. Some studies even suggest that people who are defined as overweight live longer than thinner people.

Our society is causing discomfort and depression among us based on a silly ideal. Some even suggest that the media is aware that this “ideal” is completely unattainable, so that every individual person will always strive to be that person, but will never attain it. Because these people will never achieve this ideal, they look to products that promise the attainability of this goal. The companies whose products they purchase will never go out of business if these people will never achieve the unattainable ideal set out by the media. As a society, we are feeding the businesses that promote these negative and unhealthy images and, in turn, are routing these negative messages back to ourselves.

We have been told our entire lives not to believe everything we see, and this issue is a textbook example of that proverb. Women are killing themselves and wasting their lives away over a false belief and a fabricated ideal. The media creates an unreachable ideal and packages it with deceit and the promise of a better life, and we eat it up. The irony is, although the media leads us to believe that our consumption of fatty foods and our expanding waistlines are killing us, what’s actually killing us is our feasting of the media’s ideals.