
As a young woman in an image-obsessed world, I feel the thin-pressure every day.
Last week, writer Jane Caro wrote an article entitled ‘The simplest act of defiance to encourage in your daughter’.
“I watch with sadness the tendency for so many young women to do what I used to do: allow themselves tiny amounts of food to stay thin,” she wrote.
She goes on to talk about how her personal obsession with food made her boring and neurotic, concluding, “it may even become an act of defiance for a young woman to simply eat whatever she wants”.
Well, Jane, I watch with sadness as more than fifty-five percent of Aussie women eat themselves to death.
As a young woman in an image-obsessed world, I feel the thin-pressure every day.
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Women's bodies make magazines.
But it’s articles like this one, rather than airbrushed models or #fitspo, that pushed me to a borderline eating disorder.
I spent much of my 19th year reading so-called ‘positive body image’ articles and devouring Ben and Jerry’s. I had moments of ‘beauty at every size’ triumph, but most days were guilt-ridden, stricken with body image anxiety. The thing is, when I read stories like Jane’s telling me I should “eat whatever I want”, it gave me an excuse to gorge on a block of chocolate as I binge-watched Girls. When I listened to the media telling me to reject the unrealistic expectations set by magazines, it made it easy to skip the gym in favour of a bag of natural confectionery.