Weight loss is an important subject for a lot of women. In our attempts to build and maintain the perfect figure we will almost certainly have to go through at least one phase of weight loss in our lives.
This is the start of a series of posts I’m going to write exploring a range of issues surrounding weight loss, including diets, exercise, measuring weight loss and keeping the weight off once it has gone.
Working to achieve the unachievable perfect figure
Often we blame our desire to maintain good figures on peer pressure and the images that we see in the media of celebrities with “perfect” figures.
For a start, let’s squash the myth that celebrities all have perfect figures. Many celebrities, such as Cameron Diaz and Britney Spears certainly do have incredible figures, but they achieve them through a lot of hard work and even they rarely reach the levels of perfection that we see. So what is going on?
The answer lies in the belief we all have of what the perfect figure should look like. In some ways it becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy. We believe that the perfect figure should have a tiny waist, significant glutes, large chest, slim thighs and so on, so the media give us what we want to see by airbrushing the photos of celebrities and models.
These airbrushed images put pressure on those same celebrities to maintain their figures at all times as close to the airbrushed image as they can manage. There is always a risk that a cruel paparazzi will snap an image of them when they are out and about and will use those images to damage their reputation when their star is no longer in the ascendant.
Meanwhile we all see these airbrushed images and see the amazing figures that our celebrities are forced to maintain at all times and start to believe that it is achievable. Once we all start to get close to these unachievable figures the media can afford to airbrush the images a little more without risking attack that the figures they are presenting us with are unbelievable.
And so we become victims of our own celebrity culture.
Women fear fat
With all these airbrushed images of perfect female figures that surround us it should come as no surprise that women now fear body fat. A study carried out by Owens, Allen and Spangler at Brigham Young University, due to be published in the psychology journal Personality and Individual Differences in May, looked at the brain scans of people as they were showed images of slender and larger strangers, both male and female. The participants had been asked to make evaluations of their own bodies in relation to the images displayed.
The researchers noted that women had a spike of activity, evidencing anxiety, when they saw images of an overweight stranger. This happened even if the test-subjects had no history of eating disorders and projected an attitude of not caring about their body image. Those who had a history of eating disorders showed an even more profound response in the self-reflection centre of the brain (medial prefrontal cortex) and showed signs of severe unhappiness and self-loathing.
The part I found most fascinating was that there doesn’t seem to have been a counter-reaction when these women were shown images of slender women and men didn’t have any of these reactions. It seems that men aren’t as hung up on the self-image issue.
What can we do?
I suspect that most women reading this would like to achieve their own idea of the perfect body, so the first thing to do is to take a sense check. Are you hopes and expectations reasonable? What are your goals and can these be achieved? If they are very long term goals then you might want to set yourself some intermediate goals too.
I hope that this series will be of interest and help to all of you who are trying to lose weight or tone and tighten up your figures ready for the summer. I’m currently on my own weight loss journey and am looking forward to learning some new tips as I go through this series.
If there is anything in particular you would like me to explore, please let me know and I’ll build it into my research.
Related posts:
Calorie deficit // May 5, 2010 at 21:03
[...] Last week I wrote about why women become obsessed with needing to lose weight. This is a series of articles about all aspects of weight loss including diet, exercise, measuring your success and keeping the weight off when you stop. [...]