New statistics find older women suffering from Anorexia and Bulimia - diseases thought to be found only in adolescents.
"The Bible," says Reese Witherspoon as she holds up a Cosmo Girl magazine to her sorority sister in the movie Legally Blonde. Women who have grown up on the "Ten Commandments" of fashion have begun to reach their 40s. The results of painfully following these secularly sacred doctrines are no longer just affecting adolescents and young women. Women nearing their thirties have now become partakers of modern fashion theology and its devastating affects. The Washington Post in an online article by Amy Forliti reported on July 22, 2007 that a growing number of women from their early to late thirties have been seeking treatment for an eating disorder.
The Stats
The article states in 2003, nine percent of patients aged 38 were treated at the Park Nicollet Health Services' Eating Disorders Institute. Now, the institute is presently treating 35% of patients over 38.
The article also states that The Renfrew Center, in the US, has also found increasing numbers of women in need of treatment across its eastern network.
Fashion Magazines possible link
The link between eating disorders and fashion magazines has been well established. Statistics like these should come as no surprise within a culture that parades thinness as devoutly as Virgin Mary icons.
A survey in 2002 found that reading fashion magazines may be linked to adolescent girl's body image and dieting practices. 1
The study concludes, "...the more they read beauty and fashion magazines, the more they may be willing, or feel pressured, to try shortcuts or potentially harmful measures to attain them."
No study has been done on women in their 30s or 40s. However, Carol Tappen, director of operations for the Eating Disorders Institute states in Forliti's article that this baby boomer generation was from their youth, a highly image conscious generation and this mentality may have carried on into their latter years.
"Baby boomers have always cared about how they looked, what they wear. I think a lot of eating disorders years ago went undiagnosed because it was the thing to do," Tappen said.
Fashion Images
Surveys on eating disorders, that usually target adolescent girls as the victims, will now need to target an older generation. A generation that is probably further removed from attaining that 'ideal' thinness after having had children and growing older.
An image-based society has become dangerously immersed in a culture indoctrinated by ads pedestaling a body type that less than three percent of women have or could ever attain.
The pervasive nature of ads and media images has become erosive on the mindsets of young girls as well as mature women. These statistics suggest a growing problem among all women in the vicinity of toxic thin images. Ads in fashion magazines aimed toward women are taking their toll among the more mature minded adults.
Women’s values have become obscured from constant visual cues from society that could aid in the development of an eating disorder epidemic. For women who use fashion magazines as a ‘Bible,’ the teaching that a woman is valueless when she cannot achieve the impossible is becoming a poisonous meditative practice among all women.
1 Steven R. Thomsen, Michelle M. Weber, and Lora Beth Brown, "The Relationship between Reading Beauty and Fashion Magazines and the Use of Pahtogenic Dieting Methods among Adolescent Females," Adolescence 37.145 (2002), Questia, 22 July 2007
