Happily walking out of the Lobby shop with an armful of Doritos, Tootsie rolls and soda you come face to face with a suggestively smiling Gwen Stefani. The artfully posed Ms. Spears stands next in line. Your eyes naturally follow her perfected curves to the tight abs of the latest model on the cover of Women’s Health. You glance down and guiltily cringe. The winter and hours of studying have clearly not left you with her figure. Perhaps it’s about time to start that diet again....

It’s common for many of us to go through this saga. Who doesn’t? Consequently we’ve all tried dieting in some form of another. We all know that the media influences our decision to diet, but to what extent does our consumption of magazines breed this desire in us? Is it possible that reading these magazines even cause us to pathogenically diet (vomit, use laxatives) ultimately making us Anorexic or Bulimic?

A study conducted in the journal ‘Adolescence’ (2002) found that the two most common dieting methods used by adolescents; restricting calorie intake and taking dieting pills are indeed influenced by the reading of women’s beauty and fashion magazines.

The study on 502 high school females between the ages of 15-18 by Thomsen et al. showed that: 8.8% said they made themselves vomit, 11.4% used laxatives, 14.5% took appetite control or weight loss pills, a large 51% skipped 2 meals a day and 52.2% restricted their calories to 1,200 or less each day. These results illuminate the prevalence of eating disorders, but is there really a connection between eating disorders and magazine reading?

In order to gauge if there was indeed a link, Thomsen et al. proceeded to group the girls into the following categories:

-Those who read magazines frequently (over two times a month)

-Those in the medium range

-Those who read infrequently (one or less a year)

 

These categories of girls were the further subdivided into four groups of:

            -Those who had great weight anxiety

            -Those who had low weight anxiety

            -Those who exercised frequently

            -Those who did not exercise frequently

 

Thomsen et al. found that the more frequently a young woman read magazines and more infrequently she exercised the more likely she was to use appetite suppressants or weight control pills. The young women who exercised infrequently and read magazines frequently often used quicker and easier solutions to attain the ‘perfect body.’ Young women who exercised frequently and did not frequently read magazines did not resort to such means.

            Although the results show that reading magazines reinforce a desire to be thin and encourage certain dieting methods. It does not prove that reading magazines has an influence on whether we pathogenically diet. In fact the study proved the exact opposite. By factoring for those girls who had high weight anxiety, Thomsen et al. accounted for those girls that were already at high risk for eating disorders. If the girls were already at risk, the magazines could not be blamed for causing them to become Anorexic or Bulimic. The percentage girls who were vomiting and or using laxatives were the ones who had already reached the point of being or becoming Anorexic or Bulimic.

So the next time you hear someone say that magazine images are one of the reasons people become Anorexic or Bulimic remember this study- it’s simply not true. Anorexia and Bulimia are caused because of a myriad of factors. So, don’t worry, you can safely sit back, kick off your shoes and enjoy your Cosmopolitan on the quad.

 

BIBLIOGRAPHY

 

Thomsen S.R., Weber M.M., Brown, L.B. 2002. The relationship between reading beauty and fashion magazines and the use of pathogenic dieting methods among adolescent females. J. Adolescence 37