According to the Journal of Research on Adolescence, 500 adolescent girls were surveyed, ages ranging from 9 to 16, close to 70% believed that advertisements in magazines have influenced their idea of the perfect body and shape.(1) "Social comparison with media-portrayed thin-ideal images has been found to increase body dissatisfaction and negative affects."(2) 

Magazines, Twitter, Facebook and the latest, Pinterest, as well as other sources of social media, all contribute to the increasing body image issues of young women today.

Body image directly correlates with how one sees themselves, when women look in the mirror they have a tendency to criticize specific parts of their body.

obesity in a neighbor had much less influence than obesity in a friend, regardless of how far away the friend lived. Friends of the same sex were particularly influential; a man who had a male friend who became obese experienced a 100% increase in his own chance of becoming obese. And when two people regarded their friendship as mutual, obesity in one member of the pair increased the other’s likelihood of becoming obese by a staggering 171%.

Although scientists don’t fully understand how obesity spreads, they suspect a major factor is that a social network influences what its members perceive as normal and acceptable. If a man sees his friends become obese over time, he may accept weight gain as natural, even inevitable. Instead of exercising more or eating less when his own weight begins to creep up, he may simply go with the flow and join the crowd.

Perhaps most remarkably, in 2009 the editor of British Vogue, Alexandra Shulman, accused fashion designers of forcing magazines to hire underweight models by only providing “minuscule” outfits for photo shoots. Shulman even claimed to have ordered some of the resulting photos retouched so that the models would not look so thin.

] some recent research has found that that the conventional wisdom in the fashion and advertising worlds is wrong, and that consumers are less interested in buying products that make them feel insecure. (The same research, though, found that exposure to overweight models had a similar negative effect on women’s self-esteem.) [9]

In fact, advertising is so strongly associated with creating insecurities that when women are shown images of products such as shoes, perfume or deodorant in the context of fictional ads, they are more likely to answer negatively to questions such as “How attractive do you find yourself?” or “How satisfied are you with your body?” than if they saw the same photos in a neutral context. 

advertisers believe that thin models sell products

Even these dangerously underweight models are often not seen as being thin enough by editors, who employ Photoshop and other image manipulation tools to create women who are literally “too thin to be true” – as well as to alter photos of celebrities so they meet this standard. Men in magazines are also frequently “photoshopped” to achieve the lean and muscular ideal. [4]

here are three basic motivations for self-comparison with others:   self-evaluation (comparing yourself to others to evaluate your relative status, "Am I keeping up with the Joneses?"), self-improvement (looking to social models to learn how to solve a problem or improve a situation, "What would X do?"), and self-enhancement (looking at social models to learn how to feel better about yourself ("How can I feel better about myself?").   When comparing themselves to a favourite movie, television, or video game character, adolescents tend to rely on all three motivations to meet the ideal being set for them.

Research has demonstrated the depression and despair that women often feel over falling short of the media models  presented to them. While men are hardly immune to the social modeling effect, it is probably not a coincidence that women are often held to a higher standard and face greater criticism for falling short. This can be even more apparent with adolescent females and the pressure they receive from their age peers.

media influences play an important role in personality development, peer pressure, and the development of a sense of identity as adolescents make the transition to young adulthood.

Girls who compared themselves with magazine images more often also suffered more often from decreased body satisfaction and eating disorders. For boys, the same held true as well, with the extra addition of increased muscularity.

What I found interesting here was how the girls and boys results ended up breaking down by magazine TYPE. The author found that girls who read fashion magazines have a small correlation with bulimic behaviors, but NO other correlations between body image and magazine reading. Boys had no correlation here either. Sports magazines were correlated with increased muscularity in girls, but NOT in boys. But the big one was the health and fitness category. For girls, health and fitness magazine reading was correlated with increased anorexic behaviors, increased bulimic behaviors, and increased drive to be thin. For boys, it was correlated with increased muscularity. The health and fitness magazines won overall for the worst impact on body image and eating disorders (which was a little surprising to me, I thought the fashions ones might be a tie).

Magazines for both men and women are thought to perpetuate problems with body image and eating disturbances. For women, it's the constant articles like "28 Flat Belly Tricks!", "Slim down for Swim Season!", and other headlines, but even more important may be the constant depiction of models, who start out already skinny and get photoshopped even thinner. For men, the magazines emphasize muscle gain, muscularity, and are increasingly coming to include weight loss articles as well. And these influences are particularly important in teens, who experience intense social pressure which is often based on how they look.

Ads for beauty-enhancing products seem to make consumers feel that their current attractiveness levels are different from what they would ideally be. "Consumers seem to 'compare' themselves to the product images in advertisements, even though the advertisement does not include a human model," the authors write. "Exposure to beauty-enhancing products in advertisements lowered consumers' self-evaluations, in much the same way as exposure to thin and attractive models in advertisements has been found to lower self-evaluations," the authors conclude.

"After viewing an advertisement featuring an enhancing product consumers evaluated themselves less positively than after seeing these products when they appeared without the advertising context,"

For many girls depressed from the exposure to the ultra thin air brushed pictures need to be “informed of the measures that are taken to alter many images in advertisements in order to clarify that humans do not naturally look like those illustrations”, therefore they shouldn’t compare their bodies with these photo-shopped illusions of perfection (An Intervention for the Negative Influence of Media on Body Esteem, Haas et. al, 3).

Research has shown that mental depression begins at a young age, kids learning by what they have seen in the media as “ideal,” following them into their teenage and even adult years. “If children grow up seeing thin women in advertisements, on television, and in film they accept this as reality and try to imitate their appearance and their actions”(Nature vs. Nurture, Shea, 1).

. In Self- Enhancing Effects of Exposure to Thin-Body Images by Joshi et al., it mentions, “exposing young women to images of thin, attractive models increases body dissatisfaction and other negative feelings”

Though we are unable to stop the effects of media images on this growing epidemic of eating disorders, we must train our minds to not be affected by such “unrealistic body shapes”

During an interview held with an up in coming model named {Britney} Kelleher, she discusses her problems with the fight to becoming overcome by an eating disorder. “ Of course. It [media] makes you think you’re not good enough. Like if you don’t starve yourself, you are never going to fit in; be able to be a model. You’re not the ideal size or look.” She also mentioned her prior struggles from losing 30 pounds and now still feeling too big even though she is stick thin. So, at what point will any of us feel like we reach the medias “expectations”?

In the article An Intervention for the Negative Influence of Media on Body Esteem by Haas, et al., they mentioned a study done by Fister and Smith (2004) on the effect of media images to women and its relationship to eating disorders and subsequent thinness. “Fister and Smith found that the association between initial risk for disordered eating and subsequent thinness expectancy endorsement was much smaller in an average-size model image-viewing group than in a controled or thin model image-viewing group.” This showed that girls who were exposed to thin model images were more affected than those exposed to the average size of women.

“Women may directly model unhealthy eating habits presented in the media, such as fasting or purging, because the media-portrayed thin ideal body type is related to eating pathology”(Stice, Schupak-Neuberg, Shaw & Stein, 1994).

The medias harmful affect on the self body image and self esteem of young girls has brought about some of these three damaging effects: eating disorders, mental depression, and physical depression.

The American Society for Aesthetic Plastic Surgery proves this by stating, “Plastic surgeons report that it is common practice for teens to bring a photo of their favorite teen celebrity to their appointments with the hope of getting that same look.” In reality, this is not possible.

A common phenomenon associated with this problem is “The Photoshop Effect.” The images that young men and women see are often not reality. In truth, the person commonly does not even exist. Through the use of Photoshop, a person’s entire appearance can be altered, or an entirely new person can be created.

In 2003, the number jumped to nearly 225,000 surgeries in which teenagers attempted to make their body more satisfactory. A common explanation behind these altercations is the media. As more and more images are addressed to young men and women the pressure increases to look “perfect.”

Considered by the beef industry to be an impressive innovation, lean finely textured beef is made from the remnant scraps of cattle carcasses that were once deemed too fatty to go into human food. The scraps are heated and centrifuged to reclaim bits of muscle and then the product is treated with ammonium hydroxide to kill bacteria like Salmonella and E. coli before being mixed into ground beef.

Schools in Illinois, Pennsylvania, Virginia and Texas have now done an about face and also put in orders with the USDA for ground beef

Schools in Illinois, Pennsylvania, Virginia and Texas have now done an about face and also put in orders with the USDA for ground beef

As of Sept. 3, seven states put in orders to the USDA for about 2 million pounds of beef that may contain the controversial product for the meals they serve in the 2013-14 school year. At this time last year there were only three states — Iowa, Nebraska and South Dakota — that had put in orders for beef that may contain lean finely textured beef.

As of Sept. 3, seven states put in orders to the USDA for about 2 million pounds of beef that may contain the controversial product for the meals they serve in the 2013-14 school year. At this time last year there were only three states — Iowa, Nebraska and South Dakota — that had put in orders for beef that may contain lean finely textured beef.

Thousands of schools across the U.S. rushed last year to stop feeding their students meat that contained the ammonia-treated beef, known by industry as lean finely textured beef.