Young people with eating disorders like bulimia nervosa, anorexia nervosa, and binge eating disorder usually share a preoccupation with body shape and weight. Instead of valuing themselves based on different parts of their personality, talents, values, and actions, they place all or most of their self-value on how their body looks or how much it weighs.
Adolescents and young adults with eating disorders also tend to perceive their own bodies as different to their ‘ideal’ body shape. These ideals are typically unrealistic and unhealthy for most people. In general, women idealise a small body and low body weight, while men may idealise a muscular and lean body shape.
Recognising that their body is different to their ideal body, young people may experience feelings of guilt, self-hate, and other kinds of distress. They may use disordered eating behaviours to try and change their body, restricting their diet, over-exercising, or using diet pills and laxatives. These patterns of thoughts and behaviours can cause and maintain eating disorders.
Acquiring Beauty Ideals
Ideas about body shape and weight don’t appear from nowhere. Young people grow up in a world that places excessive value on people’s physical appearance rather than their other attributes. In recent decades, Western social norms and beauty standards have consistently idealised ‘thin’ female bodies and ‘muscular’ male ones.
Research has established the powerful role that social and cultural influences play in the development of negative body image.
But how do young people acquire these ideals and standards? One important influence is the media, including social media, TV, and magazines. Values and social norms can also be shared through friendships or family relationships, in more abstract conversations about body shape and weight or through direct criticism and commentary.
Another way that young people are exposed to these values – and one that is sometimes overlooked – is through the food industry itself. The types of foods that are sold and the way they are marketed transfer certain messages to consumers about how they should eat – what is ‘healthy’ food, what is ‘unhealthy’ food, and what does ‘healthy food’ even mean?
The Impact of ‘Diet’ Products
Many of the products that young people are offered – and buy – are marketed as ‘diet’ products. These products send a message to young people that ‘dieting’ is a good thing. At the centre of this message lies the idea that a smaller body (that young people could obtain by dieting) is valued and desired.
These messages all contribute to the ‘thin’ beauty ideal that frequently underpins disordered eating behaviours. Experts from eating disorder charities have expressed serious concerns about the way ‘diet’ product marketing leads to fat shaming, poor body image, and dangerous dieting behaviours.
Diet food products also encourage young people to choose food based on its calorie content rather than choosing foods that they want to eat and that fulfil their bodies’ needs. These behaviours cause young people to focus on and think about their body shape and weight, a common trait of people with eating disorders.
Research has found that even five-year-old girls associate the word diet with food restriction, weight loss, and thinness.
Conflating Size with Health
Diet products also communicate certain ideas about what it means to be healthy. The usual discourse around dieting suggests that health is connected to your body size and weight when, in reality, research shows that health is possible in a variety of body shapes and sizes.
These misconceptions about health can also promote disordered eating behaviours, reinforcing social ideas that smaller bodies are more desirable.
‘Thinness’ and Social Status
In their advertising campaigns, diet products sometimes connect dieting and ‘thinness’ with higher social status. Young people are subtly taught that being thin will help them to make friends, build a career, and be accepted by others. These ideas further bolster the harmful ‘thin ideal’.
Avoiding Diet Products in Eating Disorder Recovery
Diet products can have a negative influence on the body image and eating behaviours of any young person – but for those in recovery from eating disorders, they may be particularly harmful. Young people with eating disorders often use food as a way to control or change their shape and weight or to cope with difficult emotions. They may be afraid of eating certain kinds of foods and categorise foods as ‘safe’ and ‘unsafe’.
Recovery from eating disorders involves re-framing how a young person understands eating and food. This might mean building positive emotional connections with food, through cooking, gardening, or other creative activities. It may involve learning to practice intuitive eating: eating in response to the body’s hunger and satisfaction cues. Intuitive eating aims to break down patterns of dieting and challenge negative thoughts surrounding food.
Diet products act as barriers to all of these aims. They hinder attempts to build positive connections with food, instead confining food within ideas of dieting, weight loss, and body shape and weight. They discourage intuitive eating and promote eating decisions based on energy intake. This can disrupt and hold back young people’s recovery journeys.
The Wave Clinic: Specialists in Eating Disorders
The Wave Clinic is a Global Centre of Excellence for the treatment of eating disorders. Our treatment spaces provide exceptional clinical care for young people at all levels of risk. Clinical and medical support is situated within a wider experience that aims to transform the lives of young people through education, vocational learning, enriching experiences, cultural sharing, and community projects.
Our team is made up of experts in child and adolescent psychiatry from different parts of the world. We offer a diverse selection of evidence-based modalities, focusing on the pervasive impact of trauma and co-occurring conditions.
If you’re interested in attending our treatment spaces, contact us today.
