Body Activism Tackles the Impossible Dream
Pick a teenage girl you know. Almost any girl will do. Ask her to describe her body.
Chances are she’ll begin by telling you what’s wrong with it. Maybe her waist is too thick, maybe her eyes are too far apart, or perhaps she feels her belly isn’t flat enough. Maybe she thinks her calves aren’t shapely or her behind is too big.
Odds are good that she will not volunteer what she likes about her body—especially her good health, a feature she may overlook or take for granted. The responses will likely be negative because—sorry to say—our culture values thinness over health. If you doubt me, look at the advertisements targeted at teens and young women in fashion magazines and other media.
Unfortunately, the recitation of her body’s perceived shortcomings isn’t a teenage girl’s isolated response to your question. Indeed, she hears a voice expressing this critical view every time she looks in the mirror, undresses in physical education class or sees an ultra-thin model in a magazine or on television. Constantly comparing herself to the manufactured ideal, she is bound to fall short.
Now multiply this emotional reality by thousands of teenage girls and young women. Recognizing the reality—that this debilitating self-talk is going on all around us—makes the presence of adolescent eating disorders and obesity far more understandable.
The teenager who tries to solve the problem of not being thin enough may adopt strict eating habits, sometimes leading to bingeing and purging, anorexia or other life-threatening eating disorders. The research of Dr. Eric Stice, a research psychologist at the Oregon Research Institute, asserts that the more the girl engages in severe eating restrictions, the more likely she is to gain weight, thereby reinforcing the difficult-to-break cycle.
One disturbing study in Sydney, Australia, found anorexia was being diagnosed in children as young as eight. Closer to home, the statistics are just as worrisome:
Dr. Stice created the Body Positive program, based on 16 years of research of over a thousand adolescent girls. The results were reported in Endocrine Today.
The eating disorder program—Body Project—utilized four one-hour sessions per week in which participants learned to challenge pressures to be thin to reduce body dissatisfaction and eating disorder symptoms.
Young girls assigned to the Body Project program demonstrated significantly greater decreases in thin-ideal internalization, body dissatisfaction and psychosocial impairments compared with assessment-only controls and expressive writing controls. These girls also showed a 60 percent reduction in risk for eating pathology onset.
I contacted Dr. Stice and shared the details of our local project—the Nevada County Meltdown—during which over a thousand people lost nearly four tons in eight weeks. He responded with further explanation of his intervention models:
I think there are some similarities in what you did and what we do in our intervention, but some differences too. It sounds like both interventions involved taking a public stance on making healthy changes, which makes it much more likely that we will follow through on our behavioral change intentions (e.g., to exercise more).
This is where doing something at a community level may be much more effective than doing it at an individual level. However, each of our two interventions involved other elements. (We compared two interventions to two control conditions in our trial.)
In the Healthy Weight program, adolescent girls and young women also committed to healthy improvements to their diets (e.g., eating less high-fat, high-sugar foods and more fruits and vegetables).
Our other intervention, which is the one you were asking about, gave these young women a chance to think about the costs of pursuing the thin ideal espoused by our mass media. This is where the body activism element comes in, wherein youth do something to challenge the pressures for thinness that are directed at young women in our culture.
In both programs, the girls were taught to appreciate their bodies, whatever the size or shape.
Dr. Stice’s interventions resonate with me for many reasons, but primarily because in the second model, participants are encouraged to become active interventionists in the lives of others. After the girls have undergone counseling on their self-image to understand how they acquired it and how the media affects their self-perceptions, they are expected to help others avoid the same trap.
In the second model, as Dr. Stice explains, the girls were encouraged to engage in body activism, such as slipping notes in diet books in bookstores or leaving notes on bathroom mirrors encouraging other girls to appreciate their bodies. By engaging in counterculture acts of nonviolent activism, the girls challenge the notion that thinness is the greatest value and simultaneously reinforce their personal commitment to a healthy and fit body.
Unless these girls take this additional step, they risk slipping back into the "thin is beautiful" view and once again becoming critical of their bodies.
That’s the conclusion I came to regarding my own fitness efforts. To simply work on my own personal fitness is not enough. I must go beyond my own needs and help others achieve their fitness goals, which is why I include “recruit or regress” in the seven steps I outline for personal transformation and community programs in From Fat to Fit: Turn Yourself into a Weapon of Mass Reduction. Actively promoting fitness is a wonderful contribution to make to others and a wonderful gift to give ourselves.
The intervention model promoting body activism is spreading across colleges and universities. Delta Delta Delta, a national sorority, is introducing the program through its campus network. Sorority leaders estimate that the program, currently operational in 11 chapters, will be available on 20 to 25 college campuses in the 2008-2009 academic year. To learn more about Dr. Eric Stice’s program or to order workbooks and manuals, go here.
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