5 Surprising Facts About Body Image
Body image…how do those words make you feel?
Globally, only four percent of women consider themselves beautiful. Although this statistic does not surprise me, it does make me sad.
Body image is defined as, “a subjective picture of one’s own physical appearance.” Essentially, our body image is a mental representation that WE create of what we think we look like and it may or may not bear a close relation to how others actually see us.
I recently saw the Dove Campaign for Real Beauty. A criminal sketch artist was hired to draw women as they see themselves and as others see them.
If you have not seen this yet, you can’t miss watching this video.
Ultimately, the social experiment revealed that women’s perceptions of themselves were very different than how others view them.
As a personal trainer and fat loss coach, I’ve worked with 1,000’s of women worldwide and I have seen first hand the struggles that many women have with body image issues. In addition to perceiving ourselves much more negatively than others perceive us, many women struggle with body dissatisfaction in the form of anorexia, bulimia, “fat talk” and more.
In a recent Gospel Coalition blog post, Joe Carter, talked about how women often strive to become an elusive image in place of who we really are and how we can have our beliefs about body image transformed. He also shared some statics that I found interesting.
5 Surprising Facts You Need To Know About Body Image
- By age 6, girls start to express concerns about their own weight or shape. In fact, 40-60% of elementary school girls (ages 6-12) are concerned about their weight or about becoming too fat. This concern endures through life.
- According to the CDC, for women ages 20 years old and older, the average height for women in America is 5’3″ and weight is 166.2 pounds. For fashion models the average is 5’10” and 120 pounds.
- A global survey found that two thirds of women strongly agree that “the media and advertising set an unrealistic standard of beauty that most women can’t ever achieve.”
- The best-known contributor to the development of anorexia nervosa and bulimia nervosa is body dissatisfaction. The median ages for onset of an eating disorder in adolescents is 12 to 13-years-old. In the United States, 20 million women suffer from a clinically significant eating disorder at some time in their life.
- Researchers have found that “fat talk”, a phenomena in which a person makes negative claims about their weight to others, is an expected norm among women and a way for them to appear more modest. A study published in the Journal of Eating Disorders found that while “fat talk” tended to decrease with age, “old talk” often came in to replace it, and that both were reported by women who appeared to have a negative body image.
Which of the above facts surprises you the most? Have you struggled with any body image issues mentioned?
Only four percent of women globally consider themselves beautiful, to me, this number is MUCH too low!
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Share this post and let’s work to END this trend of body dissatisfaction, together, the RIGHT way!