This week is National Eating Disorder Awareness Week in Canada: an annual effort by groups across the country to educate the public about eating disorders and body image issues. According to the National Eating Disorders Association (NEDA), the aim of the week is “to ultimately prevent eating disorders and body image issues while reducing the stigma surrounding eating disorders and improving access to treatment.”

The week-long event is promoted by the National Eating Disorder Information Centre (NEDIC). According to NEDIC representative Emily Pam, “we take for granted the idea that women – and men, too – should look a certain way… It sort of gets lost that eating disorders are a really serious problem and it comes from, in some part, trying to live up to a certain cultural ideal.”

Thus, promoting awareness of eating disorders often includes de-bunking the myths and unrealistic body image ideals that popular media promotes. According to NEDIC’s website, “the media doesn’t cause eating disorders, but they send out the clear message that you should be thin. They keep showing or telling us certain lies about women, such as ‘You can’t and shouldn’t be happy with yourself unless your body looks exactly like the thin ideal.’”

Supermodel Kate Moss, for example, is 5’7” and weighs around 100 pounds, which is 30 per cent below what is widely considered ideal body weight and meets the critical body mass index for anorexia. Further, according to the Renfrew Center Foundation, only 5 per cent of women have the body type seen in most advertising: tall, genetically predisposed to being thin, broad-shouldered, narrow-hipped, long-legged and usually small-breasted. In fact, Hollywood sex symbol Marilyn Monroe wore around a size 12, far from today’s projected ideal.

Reflecting this concern, NEDIC has made “celebrating our natural sizes” the slogan for the week.

NEDA reports that Americans spend more than $40-billion on dieting and diet-related products each year, and the diagnosis of eating disorders has been growing at unprecedented rates in the past two decades, with as many as ten million females and one million males diagnosed  with an eating disorder.

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Internet site reference: http://www.mcgilldaily.com/2012/02/celebrating-our-natural-sizes