how can we learn to love our bodies?
by Jenny Bryan
Seven-year-old Ellen squeezes an inch of flesh over the top of her jeans to show how fat she is and complains about the state of her legs:
© Getty
'I think people think I'm fat because I'm the only one in my class that has got fat legs. Everyone else has got skinny legs,' she lisps through the gap in her front teeth.
At 11, her older sister Laura is already taking action against what she sees as her fat tummy by doing step ups and sits ups at night before she goes to bed. Yet her skinny frame has yet to register any sign of the increase in body fat that goes with puberty.
Ellen and Laura's mother, Paula, claims never to have dieted seriously but, as Ellen reports, she uses slimming drinks to keep her weight down.
Six-year-old Vanessa's mum feels guilty that her daughter already worries about her 'fat' thighs when she wears a bikini and wants to lose some weight.
'I just think that my bad self image has rubbed off on my daughter and I don't know how to combat that. I don't know how to redress it and I'm really concerned for the future,' she explains.
Body dissatisfaction is now so common amongst girls and women of all ages that psychologists are beginning to question whether it's even an illness. Women who are asked to point to pictures that most closely resemble the shape and size of their body routinely pick women who are larger than themselves.
'Eighty five to ninety per cent of women overestimate their size, so can we still say that problems with body image are pathological if they affect nearly half the population?' asks Professor Glenn Waller, head of clinical psychology at St George's Hospital, London.
Dr Andrew Hill, from Leeds University Medical School, explains that body image problems are often passed down through families:
'If mum's concerned about her weight and if there are siblings who are dieting, then younger children are also likely to be shape- and weight-concerned, and dieting themselves. There's some sort of transmission within the family,' he says.
'There are five-year-olds who are acutely aware of what dieting means. It's almost like using nutrition as a scalpel. You can trim bits off your body, lose a bit of weight and achieve the body shape you want, simple by reducing the amount that you eat,' he adds.
His research shows that, from an early age, children link being fat with being unintelligent, doing less well at school, being lazy and smelly and less liked by parents. In contrast, skinny shapes are associated with being successful and attractive and having lots of friends.
(January 2003, resources updated March 2005)
