Ideal Body Image - What Does It Mean?
How Does The Media Affect Our Perception of Body Size?

Ideal body image refers to your view of the ideal body shape and how you see yourself. These perceptions can be skewed due to cognitive distortions or media influences on eating disorders.

Throughout the years, the ideal body image (with regards to what is accepted by society) has spanned from voluptuous to emaciated, and everything in between. Excessive weight loss tactics are equally as varied.

A lot of people I know have tried one type of 'fad diet' or anorexic diet after another, yet they never seem to find any sort of long-lasting success or satisfaction for their efforts.

Prejudice against obesity seems to be widespread in our culture. It's just assumed that obese people eat more, exercise less and experience greater health risks than thin people.

The following is a quote from Judith Stein:

"Fat oppression doesn't just affect fat people or fat women. It really works to keep everyone in line. It's a whole system of social control that keeps thin women absolutely terrified of being fat or thinking they are fat, and a whole lot of energy goes into dealing with fat.

It keeps women who are medium-sized absolutely panic-stricken because they are right on the border. Those of us who are fat are over that border into some state of evil, basically, very much outside of what is permissible within white American culture. If you are fat, then what you are supposed to do is strive desperately to get non-fat....." - (Judith Stein, Fat Liberation Movement, Mitchell, Newmark, 1981)

Our society has become fat-phobic, and all you need to do is take a glance through a media of your choice - magazines, television - and you can see that this is true.

Some anorexic people refer to this type of advertising as "thinspiration", or motivation to do whatever it takes to achieve their own ideal body image - even if it results in emaciation.

Pro Anorexia Websites - Effects On Ideal Body Image

A lot of professionals seem to agree that 'pro ana websites' - (websites that promote eating disorders) - are some of the leading contributors to the maintenance of eating disorders in our society.

Although these sites may not be one of the direct causes of anorexia, they certainly do very little (if anything) to help prevent or discourage it.

Along with the media in general, such websites promote the concept that your perception of the ideal body image must be the same as theirs - extremely thin, sometimes emaciated, and likely very unhealthy.

If you don't fit into that cookie-cutter ideal, then you will be frowned upon. It's almost a form of discrimination.

Is it any wonder that people are so drawn into joining the diet craze, and are developing an intense fear of being fat? Sadly, even the numbers of young children being targeted is on the rise.

What Is A Healthy, Ideal Body Image?

In my opinion, there is no set description of the ideal body shape or image. I don't even think that it has a whole lot to do with physical appearance. For me, it's something more.

I believe that you can have a healthy body image by thinking (and believing) positive things about yourself. Accept what you see in the mirror as being okay - and perhaps even learn to like that person staring back at you :)

As long as you are medically stable and healthy, your ideal body image, and the picture that it creates inside your head, can be of any size. It's YOU - just as you are.

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