Think out loud here: I wonder if it might be better for the population as a whole for there to be a lot more pressure from magazines, etc, for women to be unrealistically thin.
My reasoning being that the problems of anorexia/bulimia are drawfed by your (and now our) obesity epidemic.
Your thoughts?
That would be like suggesting an alcoholic take up snorting coke in place of drinking. It only replaces one vice with another (and a potentially more dangerous one, at that).
LilShieste
Curing one problem by intentionally bringing on another is never good and to be honest most peoples problem with being overweight is not really comparable with anorexia. Anorexia is primarily a mental disorder with serious and potentially life-threatening physical effects. Anorexia nervosa - Wikipedia
Obesity can come from psychological issues, but is more often just a lack of good nutritional info and exercise. I agree that more should be done to help people get to and maintain a normal and healthy weight, but encouraging unrealistic thinness is an absurd goal.
the problems of obesity is a greater problem for our countries because there are so many more obese people then anorexics. I don’t know for sure, but I would think that an individual anorexic might have it worse than the average obese person.
And why just pressure on women? If you really think anorexia is better than obesity, shouldn’t men share the benefit as well?
Wow.
So, telling people “you’re not good enough” is constructive how?
With what vice to you propose to replace food?
Anorexia is NOT “anti-obesity”. It’s slow suicide. Bulimia is a horrible addiction that often turns into obesity because yo-yo eating and yo-yo dieting short-circuit the body’s natural ability to maintain a normal, healthy weight.
If we want to encourage healthy behavior in our society, we need to turn off the media (television, movies AND the internet) and get outside for some sweaty exercise. And eat foods that haven’t been processed to high heaven.
Nobody makes any money off of that equation, though, so it’s harder to mount a campaign.
I’m not suggesting replacing obesity with anorexia.
It seems to me that social pressures on people to be thin have been in decline, partly because it was recognised that these pressures were causing anorexia.
However, these pressures were also surely discouraging obesity.
My premise is that, perhaps, what we have gained by less anorexia we have lost, many times over, through increased obesity.
Dude, anorexia is not an honest desire to be thin.
It’s suicide via food.
Completely different.
If you’re really determined to make a big sweeping policy, how about persuading food manufacturers to roll back sugar and salt in processed foods to the levels they were at in the 1950s, and ordering restaurants to halve their portions?
I join the chorus of respondents wondering how the hell that’s supposed help the obesity epidemic in any practical way. Think about it: the American obesity epidemic has flourished over the past few decades while we’ve been seeing skinny models all over magazine covers, movies, etc. Clearly, establishing societal expectations of unrealistic thinness via media saturation with slender professional beauties doesn’t actually accomplish jack-shit in helping ordinary women avoid obesity.
Your “solution”, as Taber notes, also ignores the problem of male obesity, which (in the US at least) occurs at only slightly lower rates than female obesity, but is just as detrimental medically to the victims’ health, if not more so. There’s no sensible medical reason to try to treat the obesity epidemic with methods that apply only to women.
The only realistic benefit that I can see in your proposal is that many men might enjoy seeing more images of unrealistically thin women in magazines, etc. But I think such men should stick to the specialist literature in that genre and not attempt to conflate their personal recreations with public-health policies.
Do you have any evidence for that? From all the diet books, diet articles in magazines, diet programs, fitness programs, and everything of that sort being advertised everywhere, it certainly doesn’t look to me as though there’s any letup in social pressures for thinness.
How much more pressure do you want in society that says obesity is bad? It’s already pretty high and doesn’t have the desired effect. You want to ratchet it up to the point where we have hunting season on the morbidly obese?
Anorexia and obesity aren’t really related to each other. They have very different causes and motivations; and solutions.
They also have very different levels of incidence. The prevalence of anorexia is estimated at somewhere on the order of 1% of the population. The prevalence of obesity, on the other hand, is well over one-third of the population (in the US).
The pressure for women to be thin has steadily increased over the past 20 years. I’m not sure how much more pressure can be exerted, now that movie stars and other media types look like lollipops that would break in a mild breeze, but I’m sure a way will be found. It doesn’t seem to help all that much, though. Perhaps just the opposite.
So–you want to encourage more young women to kill themselves? Obesity is definitely bad for the health, but anorexia can be fatal much more quickly.
What about the men? There are quite a few big ones around. Ever hear of man-boobs?
Besides the obvious issues already raised, there is the simple fact that the effect would likely be to increase obesity, not to decrease it. As I had pointed out in a previous thread, the unhealthy dieting behaviors so encouraged not only increase the risk for anorexia and bulemia, they also increase the risk for obesity!
So all around, a bad idea. Thanks for playing. Please enjoy the home version of our game.
Yeah, and stop selling those £10 steak pies
Perhaps an obese person would look at the picture of someone who is unrealistically thin and then just give up any pretense of improving their diet and exercise. After all, there’s no way they’re going to be able to look as “healthy” as the unrealistically thin models so they might as well eat and be happy.
What we need to do to combat obesity is to encourage people to eat less processed foods and to exercise more. Giving them unrealistic goals isn’t going to help anyone.
This has got to me one of the most unintentionally funny statements I’ve seen in a while. Of course the obese dwarf the anorexic folks because they’re so much larger.
Marc
To address two issues raised:
I am not suggesting that obese people should become anorexic. Rather, I am suggesting that the same social pressures that turn a tiny number anorexic could also do a lot of good by discouraging obese people from being… obese.
There is absolutely no doubt that is becoming more socially acceptable to be obese. It is much more acceptable than it was even five years ago.
Perhaps I was wrong in saying it should be the media taking a lead. Perhaps we all have a responsibility to treat the obese with dignity, politeness, but just a little bit of disrespect.
And as an aside, unrealistic goals are a good thing. If you don’t set yourself impossible goals, then you’ll never know just how far you can push yourself.
Small British Shop Owner writes:
> 1) I am not suggesting that obese people should become anorexic. Rather, I am
> suggesting that the same social pressures that turn a tiny number anorexic
> could also do a lot of good by discouraging obese people from being… obese.
It appears, in fact, that the social pressures that turn a lot of people obese are the same social pressures that turn a smaller number of people anorexic. (In the following I’m talking about the U.S. To a lesser extent this applies to the U.K.) What’s happening is the following: For many years now the average price of food has slowly decreased. This is particularly true of corn and some other grains, since agricultural price supports have made them cheaper. This makes it particularly cheap to use corn syrup in everything and for processed food to be cheap. It’s also become harder not to eat fast food, which is usually fattening. The ability to get exercise has decreased for several reasons. Partly it’s because it’s less easy to walk to work. Now most people must take transportation to it. Partly it’s because we’re working slightly more hours a week. Partly it’s because we’re spending more time on sedentary pursuits, like posting to the SDMB. Simultaneously, there has been social pressure to be thin (particularly for women). (For men, the pressure is often more to be muscular.)
This means that on average we’re eating more and getting less exercise. Most people can just barely keep their weight under control in this situation, but about a third of people are going to slowly become obese under these pressures. We can divide this group of people into several subgroups. Some of them (particularly men) just give up from the start. They generally can’t find time to exercise even if they want to, and they don’t care about social pressure enough to try. Another group of people (particularly women) do care about social pressure, so they try to diet the weight away. Most fail eventually and join the first group of obese people. Some succeed and control their weight. Some can’t stick to a decent diet and instead become anorexic or bulemic.
> 2) There is absolutely no doubt that is becoming more socially acceptable to be
> obese. It is much more acceptable than it was even five years ago.
It depends what you mean by socially acceptable. It’s becoming more common to be obese. It’s not becoming more popular to be obese. It’s less popular, if anything.
> Perhaps I was wrong in saying it should be the media taking a lead. Perhaps
> we all have a responsibility to treat the obese with dignity, politeness, but just
> a little bit of disrespect.
That’s what we do now, and it doesn’t work.
> And as an aside, unrealistic goals are a good thing. If you don’t set yourself
> impossible goals, then you’ll never know just how far you can push yourself.
Do you have any evidence that unrealistic goals work? Not anecdotes, but actual research? It could well be that setting yourself unrealistic goals makes it harder to achieve realistic ones.
I don’t think anorexia is the opposite of obesity. I think they’re almost completely unrelated. And I think obesity is a much bigger problem than anorexia.
From a cite whose accuracy I’m not sure of, used as a starting point for this discussion http://www.lilith-ezine.com/articles/health/Anorexia-Vs-Obesity-in-North-America.html:
Surely promoting a healthy weight range has got to be more beneficial to both anorexic and obese individuals?