14 DAY TRIAL // It has often been said that celebrity culture is responsible for teaching young impressionable girls that thin equates beautiful, which has pushed millions to go on diets, starve themselves and ultimately develop eating disorders. A new study cited by PhysOrg comes to show that this is not necessarily the case, since weight control behavior is related to peers and not someone on the outside.
The findings of the study show that not all teen girls equate thin with beautiful for the simple reason that those around them are more on the heavy side. This way, being overweight becomes acceptable, just like being underweight is acceptable in schools with a larger number of girls who are on inappropriate diets. In the end, whether a teen girl wants to lose, gain or maintain the same weight seems to be mostly dependent on how her mates look like.
“Our findings provide evidence that girls’ weight-control behaviors are more complicated than often assumed. Every school does not have the same emphasis on being thin and losing weight, and even within schools, girls respond to the school culture differently. What our findings showed was that girls were more aware of what others like them were doing. Underweight girls were not likely to be trying to lose weight, unless they were in schools where underweight girls regularly reported trying to lose weight,” lead study author Anna Mueller, at the University of Texas at Austin, says about the findings, as cited by the aforementioned publication.
“It is not surprising that girls’ behavior would be influenced by the behaviors of their peers, whether they be perceived or real. This is true for many types of behaviors including risky behaviors, such as substance use. Perceptions that ‘everyone is doing it’ are powerful motivators,” Jeanie Alter, lead evaluator of the Indiana Prevention Resource Center at Indiana University’s School or Health, Physical Education, and Recreation, says for PhysOrg, echoing Mueller’s sentiment.
Based on the findings of this study, it becomes clear that schools can play an important role in educating girls towards having a healthy body image. By sending out the right message about dieting and weight loss, schools can change girls’ perception on how they should approach the matter.