Is the Fashion Industry Pressuring Women to Diet?
If there is one area of life that puts unnecessary pressure on women to do what is unnatural in health terms it's the fashion industry creating a body image that women feel forced to comply with.
To that end, the diet industry is only too eager to help women to get thinner than they realistically need to be all the while fueling a never ending spiral of what in many instances results in unhealthy dieting practices in the perceived need to be thin.
The Need to be Attractive
In many respects, it is in our own inherent nature to make ourselves as attractive to the opposite sex as we possibly can and this is largely what fashion aims at fulfilling. Unfortunately, many will agree that it goes too far in employing very tall, very thin models to show off the latest creations in clothing which all the while will look amazing on those models but never quite the same on women with fuller figures.
Hence the culture of unrealistic dieting undertaken by many women who try to emulate these fashion models. They do so in a vain attempt to look as good and sexually attractive as they perceive the models to look, in the misplaced belief that it is what men desire the most.
Yet strangely enough the super slender look is not necessarily the ideal physical appearance that most men find most desirable!
Media Support
What is often ignored is that many guys prefer a woman to have the "curves in all the right places" and that usually means carrying more weight than the typical fashion model tends to.
As long as the media supports the fashion culture and its use of often unrealistically slim models to promote the latest clothing fads, there will always be a huge following of women mesmerized by those abnormally thin bodies and the desire to emulate them. They will go to great lengths to achieve their desire and that's when the massive problem of diet related health issues raises its ugly head.
Dangers
Excessive dieting mixed with an errant perception of what is physically desirable can lead to conditions such as anorexia nervosa and bulimia nervosa which if left untreated can threaten the very lives of those caught up in their vise-like grip. This is when the doctors and medical health professionals are called upon to get involved, often at late stages of these illnesses where working on affecting recovery is much more difficult.
The very real danger of malnutrition heads the list of potential problems that await the victims of these illnesses if not treated in time. Yet it is often the case that sufferers do not recognize they even have a problem themselves, making the task of treatment very difficult.
Yet with the right level of health and diet education (see: https://sites.google.com/view/isyourdiethealthy for more details) available as it actually is these days with the vast knowledge base that is the Internet, this should not be happening any more. But it still does, meaning there is more to this problem than the right information being easily available alone and it goes deeper than just knowing about it.
To force change would not work as people simply resist the change especially when it goes so deeply as to affect a fundamental human instinct. The fashion industry needs to take more responsibility for the culture it creates with media backing before people will sit up and take notice. More information can be found here: Eating Disorders and the Role of the Media
- Terry Didcott
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Posted on Sun, Jun 2 2019 in Diet | 0 Comments