Fostering a Healthy Body Image in Your Pre-Teen and Teen (Part I):
Body Image and Weight

Spend an afternoon watching your child’s favorite shows, or looking through fashion magazines for teens. Do you see anyone who looks like your child? Probably not, because the “ideal body” of today’s TV star or fashion model is generally a product of dangerous starvation diets and plastic surgery.

Statistically, only 3 in every 100 women has a fashion-model figure -- meaning that 97 in 100 girls think their bodies are “abnormal” compared to the artificial ideal promoted by the media. This dissatisfaction rises as children enter their teen years and become more interested in looks and aware of their own appearance.

In other cultures, a child’s first steps into manhood or womanhood are celebrated. For instance, women in some African tribes receive special tattoos when they reach puberty and begin developing womanly curves, and Judaism honors both boys and girls who reach the age of 14 with a special ceremony. But for most American girls (and a growing number of boys), there is no celebration or ceremony. Instead, there’s a growing realization that their bodies are growing thicker, plumper or curvier in a culture that despises a healthy body as “fat,” “weak,” and “gross.”

As a result, more than half of 13-year-old girls, and more than three-quarters of 17-year old girls, are unhappy with their bodies. By the time they hit college, nearly all will be dieting and more than 10 percent will have life-threatening eating disorders. Boys, too, are now becoming victims of the unrealistic images they see in the media. As a result, eating disorders now affect around 3 percent of boys, and at least one-third of male teens engage in extreme dieting or binge eating.

Ironically, the media’s promotion of dangerous thinness as an ideal leads millions of children to begin dangerous dieting when they aren’t actually overweight -- an ordeal they frequently undertake with the blessing of parents and doctors who focus on weight tables instead of factoring in children’s genes and development. For instance, consider the three children I described at the beginning of this article:

• The first girl, Katie, was actually at an appropriate and healthy weight for her height and age. She just “felt” big because she wasn’t as slim as a fashion model, and because she was being pressured by a coach to maintain an unnaturally child-like figure. By accepting the idea that her weight was a problem, and aiding her efforts to go below her natural weight, her parents played a strong role in pushing her into an eating disorder.

• The second child, Latisha, inherited her father’s genes, and is biologically designed to be taller and somewhat larger than her more slender peers and her mother.  Moreover, her body was preparing to reach puberty at 10 years of age, which is a common phenomenon for African American girls (who often begin menstruating a year or so earlier than other girls). But because she was bigger than her mother, both her parents and her doctor bought into the idea that she was “fat.”  She also started to feel ashamed about her size -- and when her parents fostered her anxiety about her body by supporting her dieting, it reinforced her sense of shame about her body and who she is. 

• As for Miguel, he was initially only a few pounds overweight -- most likely the result of his transition from childhood to adolescence, as well as his lack of physical activity. His parents’ decision to put him on a diet and pay him to lose weight backfired by driving him to “retaliatory grazing.”

If dieting actually worked, or at least did no harm, then it wouldn’t really matter if these children had spent a few weeks counting calories or carbs -- even though they didn’t need to. But in reality, a child’s first diet is often the initial step toward a dangerous eating disorder or obesity. In fact, parents need to be aware that dieting often creates lifetime food, body image, and weight problems.

Here’s how the vicious cycle works. Fewer than 5 percent of dieters successfully keep off the pounds they lose, and more than one-third of them gain back more weight than they lost. That’s because dieting triggers excessive hunger and causes our bodies to store fat more efficiently.

As a result, the child who initially diets to get rid of a few pounds of “baby fat” is likely to gain weight instead, causing feelings of shame and distress -- feelings that in turn can lead to secretive eating and bingeing. That’s the first step in a cycle of failed diets, out-of-control eating, and weight gain -- a cycle that often lasts a lifetime. Worse yet, failed diets lead many children to ever-more-restrictive diets, eventually culminating in full-blown bulimia or anorexia. More than one in three dieters progresses to extreme dieting, and a quarter of those people will develop eating disorders.

In addition to setting children up for obesity or eating disorders, dieting is dangerous in other ways. For example, 45% of skeletal mass develops during the teen years, and strict dieting can dramatically reduce bone mass. Dieting also impairs thinking and memory and mood, making it more difficult for children to succeed at school and enjoy their lives.  In addition, extreme dieting can damage the kidneys, heart, and immune system.

In short dieting creates weight problems and eating disorders in children who aren’t overweight to begin with, and it doesn’t help children who are overweight to lose their excess pounds.