Love Your Body Week Campaign Hopes

This week marks Lve Your Body Week (LYBW), a campaign started by the National Organization for Women (NOW) Foundation in 1998 to raise awareness of the negative and harmful advertising used by industries to sell their products, its impact on women and girls’ self esteem, and on eating disorders, which are rapidly increasing and developing at earlier ages than ever before. In fact, statistics show that 80 percent of all children have been on a diet by the time they reach the fourth grade.
It isn’t surprising that eating disorders are on the rise considering the emphasis our society places on being thin. Ads in magazines and on the television tend to use the most idealized images of women, touched up and air-brushed to perfection. TV shows feature actresses, many who have endured hours of exercise and deprived themselves of proper nutrition in order to maintain their thin figure, and some who have even resorted to plastic surgery, liposuction and breast implants to enhance their body image.

Statistics on eating disorders are staggering. According to the American Psychological Association (APA), 10 million people in the United States, mainly women, struggle with anorexia nervosa or bulimia nervosa. Both disorders involve an obsession with not gaining weight and an intense anxiety about food, though this obsession manifests differently in each case. People with anorexia have a distorted body image that causes them to see themselves as overweight even when they’re dangerously thin. Often refusing to eat, exercising compulsively, and developing unusual habits such as refusing to eat in front of others, they lose large amounts of weight and may even starve to death. Physical problems associated with anorexia nervosa include damage to the heart and other vital organs, low blood pressure, slowed heartbeat, constipation, abdominal pain, loss of muscle mass, hair loss, sensitivity to the cold, and fine body hair growth.