How do media images play into anorexia?
It was so interesting, when all the girls on “Friends” started to lose weight, we saw a huge group of girls that came in for treatment soon after that. Because as everybody was looking up to all of those stars, all the stars of that show. So when those women began to lose weight, then the women out here that are watching them, that are looking up to them, that are adoring them are feeling “Oh my God, if she thinks she's too fat, I think I'm too fat, I have to lose weight.” And so, over the course of a person dieting, out of a hundred people that could be on a diet at any given time, thirty-three of those hundred turn into anorexia bulimia. That's how huge a prevalence we end up having as a result of dieting. So the way media plays a role is if you have these top stars that are glamorizing these diets and you read “People” magazine and they give you the diet of the person. A lot of my patients will tell me is that “What I'm trying to do is, if she looks as good as she does and this is the diet that she followed to look as good as she does, then I'm going to follow that diet and within three months they're in my clinic needing to be treated for anorexia bulimia. So they play a role. The Olsen twins, when one needed to be treated, when that happened, we ended up having a huge increase in girls coming in for treatment. So what happens in the media directly affects our eating disorder clinics because we just see that impact that the media personalities have on the emerging sense of self of young women all over the world. The other part is that Fiji didn't have television. And five years after they got television in Fiji (this was a study that was done about ten years ago), five years after they got TV, they went from zero prevalence of eating disorders to twelve to fourteen percent within five years of “Baywatch” coming into their country. So when Western media came into Fiji, instantly within five years, it just took five years, for the eating disorder rates to get to the level that we have over here.
