health and fitness: Learning to love our bodies

samedi 1 août 2015

Learning to love our bodies | Eva Wiseman

A young woman dies taking diet pills; girls as young as eight are dissatisfied with their bodies... How raising awareness around obesity is triggering eating disorders

I’m trying to remember how I felt about my body when I was eight. Only I can’t really remember having a body back then. I can remember being a chimpanzee. I can remember being a wrestler, and a vampire, and a sad clown, and a tree, but in none of these guises was my body anything other than an extension of my own mind. It wouldn’t have occurred to me to separate it from what was simply “me” – it was me like my voice was me, like the way I felt about peas was me. Things have changed.

The largest UK study ever on eating disorders in children followed 6,000 kids through their lives and found that at the age of eight 5% of girls (and 3% of boys) were dissatisfied with their body. This dissatisfaction rose as they got older – at 14 it had grown to swallow 32% of girls (and 16% of boys). Bearing in mind this was six years ago, I wonder how today’s eight-year-olds feel.