Healthy Body Image

What do you see when you look in the mirror? If you hate what you see, you may have an unhealthy body image. For me personally, I always imagined myself scrawny skinny when I was younger, despite the fact I was one of the fittest kid around in school, and that prompted me to take up a healthy lifestyle mindset instead. And now I do feel good about myself after years of self-therapy. It’s all in the mind.

Body image is a term which may refer to a person’s perception of his or her own physical appearance, or the interpretation of the body by the brain. Essentially, body image describes how one perceives one’s appearance to be to others, which in many cases may be dramatically different from one’s objective physical condition or how one is actually perceived by others.

Within the media industry there have recently been popular debates focusing on how Size Zero models can negatively influence young people into feeling insecure about their own body image.

It has been suggested that size zero models be banned from cat walks. Many celebrities are targeted by the media due to their often drastic weight loss and slender frames, examples of such personalities would be Victoria Beckham, Nicole Richie and British Super Model Kate Moss.

Some examples of celebrity men targeted in a similar fashion can be found, but the media seem to focus principally on the effect that the Size Zero phenomenon has on young women. Media however, is generally quick to denounce celebrities endorsing fad diets, including popstars who describe girls who are not under a peer pressurized size, a “social suicide”.

Body image is often measured by asking the subject to rate their current and ideal body shape using a series of depictions. The difference between these two values is the amount of body dissatisfaction. Monteath and McCabe found that 44% of women express negative feelings about both individual body parts and their bodies as a whole. Psychology Today found that 56% of the women and about 40% of the men who responded to their survey in 1997 were dissatisfied with their overall appearance.

The desire to lose weight is highly correlated with poor body image, and more women than men desire to lose weight. Kashubeck-West et al. reported that when considering only men and women who desire to lose weight, sex differences in body image disappear.

Men’s body image is a topic of increasing interest in both academic articles and in the popular press. Current research indicates many men wish to become more muscular than they currently perceive themselves to be, often desiring up to 26 pounds of additional muscle mass.

The desire for additional muscle has been linked to many men’s concepts about masculinity. A variety of research has indicated a relationship between men’s endorsement of traditionally masculine ideas and characteristics, and his desire for additional muscle.

Some research has suggested this relationship between muscle and masculinity may begin early in life, as boys’ action figures are often depicted as super-muscular, often beyond the actual limits of human physiology.