Body Image Issues - Your Children are Listening

Hmmmmmmm - for me this is a truly vexed issue. Like millions of women around the world, I have struggled with body image issues for much of my life. Whilst I intellectually know I am not fat, I have spent far too much of my life believing this notion to be an absolute truth. Whilst it sounds cliched, this all started in my childhood and continued on into my adult life, with relationships with abusive partners and I guess I've never adequately dealt with the issues so they continue to haunt me from time to time.

I vividly remember a comment my father made about the size of my backside when I was 12 years of age; immediately before my mother put me on my first diet. For Christ sake, I was hitting puberty, sprouting breasts and hips and rounding out as nature intended - but my (size 6, bikini-wearing) mother was having none of it - it was lettuce leaves and carrot sticks for her pudgy daughter from that day forth.

It's just so, so sad and my heart aches for all the young girls out there who are bombarded with media images of impossibly thin, impossibly (airbrushed) beautiful models and the whole sexualisation of younger girls who are encouraged to dress in a manner completely inappropriate to their age. Perhaps most disturbing is the fact that media images of female beauty are unattainable for all but a very small number of women. Researchers generating a computer model of a woman with Barbie-doll proportions, for example, found that her back would be too weak to support the weight of her upper body, and her body would be too narrow to contain more than half a liver and a few centimeters of bowel. A real woman built that way would suffer from chronic diarrhea and eventually die from malnutrition !! Hideous, but true - and still, the number of real life women and girls who seek a similarly underweight body is epidemic, and they can suffer equally devastating health consequences.

Of course I understand that our body image is how we perceive, think and feel about our body, which may have no bearing at all on our actual appearance. For instance, it is common in Western nations for women to believe they are larger and fatter than they really are. According to studies conducted in Australia, only one in five women are satisfied with their body weight. Nearly half of all normal weight women overestimate their size and shape. As I know only too well, a distorted body image can lead to self-destructive behaviour, like dieting, binge eating or eating disorders(in my case, bulimia for many, many years). And, approximately nine out of 10 young Australian women have dieted at least once in their lives.

The barrage of messages about thinness, dieting and beauty tells "ordinary" women that they are always in need of adjustment and that the female body is an object to be perfected.

Your children are listening - so, please, please whether you are a mum or dad, an aunt or uncle, a neighbour or friend, or simply a passerby, make your best effort to be a positive influence on the young kids out there. Let’s try to fill those young minds with a fresh and healthy perspective on body image and stop the self-destructive behaviour from perpetuating.