The benefits of social media are many and include the ability to stay in close contact with friends and family, the commercial aspects of having access to a self publishing tool, enjoying direct contact with your audience and having a means to drive traffic to your website. The downside of social media, and perhaps Instagram specifically, is that these platforms can tend to be wholly visual and can fuel body image anxiety for some.
A global beauty ideal could be seen to have four features such as thinness, firmness, smoothness (non hairy) and youth (As Professor Heather Widdows at the University of Birmingham points out in her book Perfect Me: Beauty as an Ethical Ideal). Think of how universal such representations of beauty are, no matter where you are in the world. Even places that used to value more rounded figures are increasingly valuing thinner figures. However, when so-called body positive health promotion campaigns are initiated they often challenge only one of those categories. The campaigns might feature very big, and curvy beautiful women that conform to the firmness and the youth. However, on body hair, the campaigns feature very thin, beautiful young women with cute bits of body hair. There is a pretence of diverse representation on social media. The subtle, or perhaps not so subtle, messaging system is that you can’t be hairy, fat and ageing!
A reasonable question to ask of healthcare professionals is how to get the balance right in pointing to BMI levels (and the need for weight loss) whilst not adding to psychological distress felt by people by the prevalence of weight loss advertising and other pressures from social media.
I wonder whether the messaging systems of seeing weight gain and obesity as a burden causes more problems when obese individuals are deemed to have self inflicted conditions. Such simple messages conflict with the causes of obesity. For instance, the 2007 Foresight report Reducing Obesity: Future Choices, investigated responses to growing obesity levels in the UK and showed the complexity of obesity and weight gain. Specifically, the report pointed to their being over 100 different factors that could contribute to obesity, including economic, social, psychological, genetic and so on. Nevertheless, we continue to see public health promotion messages that say that we should “eat less and move more” as a focus for obesity. These slogans are probably true. That whatever the cause of obesity there is still an imperative to eat less and move more. However, it is worth speculating whether these messages might actually be over simplifying a very complex health condition.
How we see other health conditions such as cancer can be very different. Of course they are not the same but is is worth advocating that dignity and respect should be the benchmark for every patient when accessing medical care. Public health policies might actually be reflecting a stigma that manifests in the patient consultations. The language used with cancer care is very empowering and positive. There is strong advocacy for allocating more resources and that cancer sufferers should have more support, and rightly so. Health promotion campaigns for cancers see people as survivors and as part of a family with many different support groups. These kind of health promotion campaigns contain feelings of hope and optimism, which is so important as these can more likely lead to behaviour change. The framing of obesity, on the other hand, can tend to be very pessimistic, and sufferers can feel anxiety and fear that can easily lead to frustration rather than positive behavioural change outcomes.
Why are we seeing an escalation in symptoms and incidents of eating disorders?
Eating disorders appear to be on the increase following the pandemic with an escalation in symptoms and incidents. I wonder if the increased autonomy in the management of time at home and the ability to control one’s own diet, exercise regime and so on, given that people were not in school, or work, meant that they were better able to dedicate more time. The role of social media is difficult to gauge, it could be that social media featured more prominently in leisure time during such times, rather than the platforms themselves being the main problem.
Life transitions could exacerbate body image issues
Robust research is lacking in this area but it seems that young people are particularly vulnerable to developing body image disorders around life transition periods, such as when they are changing schools, moving from one geographical area to another or moving within friendship groups. I wonder whether this feeds into a general feeling of lack of control and general anxiety and stress, which can then end up exacerbating body image issues.
Life transitions can be a time of anxiety when we perhaps unconsciously encounter a form repetition in how we deal with beginnings and endings. How we deal with the feelings associated with relationship breakups, changing job, college course or our home, or negotiating the challenges presented with the ageing process can often determine whether we overly rely, or not, on something that offers comfort at a time of such transition.
How counselling can help
Sometimes the public debate about obesity sees our bodies as if they are not us. Bodies have become selves, and this has the effect of producing a kind of crisis of identity. This could be why some of the health promotion interventions feel so problematical and why weight stigma has become so debilitating for many people.
Research appears to indicate that certain personality traits might be associated with developing body image disorders, including body dysmorphic disorder and eating disorders. One might be perfectionism. The risks of entering into body image problems and the associated body image disorders might be because the vulnerability factor has interacted and intersected with a range of other risk factors, which could be environmental (including cultural issues) but also genetic viability, as well as experiences like bullying and trauma.
Counselling sessions can offer the opportunity to see yourself more holistically and to heal past emotional wounds that caused discomfort. It could be potentially transformative to engage more holistically with your body and enjoy more personal choices in your lifestyle.
See also my latest article on addressing body image anxiety in an era of social media.
Noel Bell is a UKCP psychotherapist based in London and can be contacted on 07852407140.
