Media Exposure's Link to Eating Disorder Symptoms

We are all familiar with the massive amounts of magazines with beautiful, skinny, toned, fit women plastered on the covers, with headliners telling you how to look like them.

This semester, I have been enrolled in a Women's Studies class, so the topic of how women are portrayed in media was obviously a huge subject.

But, how does this truly affect us? Sure, we can make assumptions, but where are the studies and the evidence?

I was able to find an article, "Relation of Media Exposure to Eating Disorder Symptomology," that actually studied how media and its images may cause an eating disorder. This study showed that media exposure led to a pathway that lead to eating disorder behaviors.

Basically, media exposure led to SYMPTOMS associated with eating disorders, not necessarily eating disorders, as obviously this study would not be able to performed to see if that were the case as it would be inhumane.

This evidence is still important because it showed that seeing these images makes women feel worse about themselves. Seeing all of these diets makes women restrict themselves, which can lead to binge eating, and disordered eating in general.

I took a few pictures of the magazines that I see in the grocery store regularly and then did a couple drawings based on how I felt after looking at some of the images.

Stice, Eric, Ericka Scheupak-Neuberg, Heather E. Shaw, and Richard I. Stein. "Relationship of Media Exposure to Eating Disorder Symptomology: An Examination of Mediating Mechanisms." Journal of Abnormal Psychology. N.p., 1994. Web.