Walk into any women’s or girls’ locker room and the conversation is guaranteed to be about weight and losing weight. Most young girls are very insecure about their appearance and believe that they should be slimmer even if they have a good weight. Why do they mean that? What drives so many women to diets?

Studies

A study by Dove among 3,000 women from 10 countries (including the Netherlands) showed that only 2% consider themselves beautiful and almost half consider themselves overweight. Shocking results, because this cannot possibly be the truth. Two problems are evident from these results: (1) women have little self-confidence, because they do not dare to call themselves beautiful (2) women estimate their ideal, healthy weight too low. The latter is confirmed by Halls, a Canadian radiologist. Based on two studies from America and Australia that asked people about their desired weight, he created an Ideal Weight Calculator. This shows that men often estimate their ideal weight to be higher, while women believe that their weight should be lower to be healthy.

Media

Where does the image that a woman should be slim come from? The answer can be found in every home: turn on the TV, open a magazine, look at billboards and surf the Internet. Just for fun, count how many normally shaped women can be found in these media outlets. Everyone will soon be laughing. On TV, in magazines, in advertisements and on websites you almost only see super slim women. Since our earliest childhood we have been bombarded with images and this has an impact on our thinking. All those images of slim women make us believe that only slim women are successful, happy and healthy. What many women also forget is that actresses and models receive a lot of help from stylists, make-up artists and not to forget the computer. The environment in a studio is very unnatural and Photoshop is applied on top of that. The women in the media are only partly real (especially if you include plastic surgery). If you have a healthy weight, dieting is absolutely not necessary. And a healthy weight is something completely different from what the media portrays as attractive. Fortunately, there are more and more initiatives to combat this media image. The Dove commercials are the best-known example of this.

Beauty industry

What many women do not realize is that cosmetic companies and providers of diet products are not at all interested in making people look more beautiful and slimmer. They are purely interested in making money. A very good example can be found in the different beauty ideals in the world. In the West, brands such as L’Oreal sell tanning creams and advertising tells you that you are beautiful if you have a sunny tan. In Asia, L’Oreal tells a completely different story: to be beautiful you have to use whitening creams. The beauty industry creates an ideal image that almost no one meets and then tells you that you will only be accepted if you meet that ideal. Have you not achieved that ideal? Don’t worry, because they have all kinds of ointments, creams, powders, meal bars, soups and pills to bring you closer. It’s a sales tactic! They tell tons of women that they are only beautiful when they use their products and most women buy into it with their eyes wide open. If a detergent commercial says that it washes whiter than ever, do you immediately believe it? Oh no! Why then do so many women immediately believe that a perfect lipstick will get them the man of their dreams or that a diet pill will make them slimmer? It’s time for women to view those kinds of advertisements with healthy distrust.

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