Research Paper

The relation between media and eating disorders has grown substantially since media has begun to advertise the different type of body images. The body image advertised by the media is only possessed naturally by 5% of American females, but has women all over the world trying to attain such an unrealistic and dangerous body image. It even has men starting to feel the pressure of becoming thin. Men now make up 25% of the eating disorders cases. For many people it is genetically impossible to obtain the media’s ideal body image, which may contribute to their obsession for a thin body frame.

The average U.S woman is 5’4 and weighs 140 whereas the average U.S model is 5’11 and weighs 117 pounds. Even plus size models average size has gown down from 12 and 18 to 6 and 14. Which would come to no surprise that on average women experience 13 negative thoughts about their body each day, while 97% of women admit to having at least one “I hate my body” moment each day and 75% of women consider themselves overweight when in reality only 25% were. Four out of five women are unhappy with their appearance even though most of them would be considered average in body image. In movies and magazines being thin is associated with positive characteristics such as popular, beautiful, and sexy, and being overweight is connected with negative characteristics like ugly, unpopular, and lazy. Therefore media is the distinct social pressure to influence people to be thin and cause eating disorders.

Children and adolescents are even more affected by the medias body image because on average they watch 3-4 hours of T.V and a study of 4,294 network television revealed that 1 out of every 3.8 commercials send some sort of “attractiveness message” telling viewers what is or is not attractive. When the children and adolescents see the overbearing thin celebrities they try to reach the media’s level of thinness and ideal body image. This is proven by the study from the University of Central Florida...