| Mirasol Eating Disorder Recovery Centers Tucson, AZ | June 21, 2005 |
 Mirasol, the spanish name for sunflower, means “looking at the sun.” In dreams, the sunflower is a symbol of spiritual joy. -Mary Summer Rain’s Guide to Dream Symbols In This Issue: Letter from the Founder What is Body Image? $3,000 You're Worth It! Scholarship Sweepstakes! Recipe: Sandwich and Salad Share The Sunflower with a friend! Click here to visit Mirasol.net and sign up your friend to share this free, monthly newsletter. Visit MirasolTeen.com, the site dedicated to teens! To subscribe or unsubscribe to the newsletter, please click here. |
A Letter From Mirasol's Founder and CEO Summer is here and as I mentioned in a previous newsletter, summer also means the wearing of shorts and bathing suits.In the next several newsletters, I want to address the topics of body image and the influence of the media on body image and eating disorders. Of all of the questions I receive, the most frequent one is, “How much of an effect does the media have on eating disorders and how we look at our bodies?” Notice I didn’t say, “How we feel in our bodies?” Whether a person has an eating disorder, whether they have recovered from one, or whether they’re simply among the 80% of all American women who don’t like their bodies, I think that almost everyone will find this of interest! I love this quote from Walt Whitman…. “I am the poet of the Body, and I am the poet of the Soul Seeing, hearing, feeling, are miracles, and each part and tag of me is a miracle. Divine am I, inside and out, and I make holy whatever I touch… The scent of these arm-pits is aroma finer than prayer… I dote on myself, there is a lot of me and all so luscious.” How many women do you know today that would speak in such reverent tones of their bodies? Not many! Read on to see how our the media plays a role in distorting our healthy body image. Warmly, Body image is an identity issue. It’s a picture you have in your mind of how your body looks to you. It is how you believe other people perceive your body. It is how you feel living in your body, carrying your body around, actually being in touch with your body. Now I’d like to have you do something with me. Close your eyes for a moment. Get a picture in your mind of what your body looks like to you. Review your body in your mind’s eye. Be aware of what words you associate with your body. Try to get in touch with the essence of your body image. Try to be scrupulously honest with yourself. Now open your eyes. Keep thinking about how you’re feeling in your body. Now imagine that you’re waking up in the morning, and making your way to the bathroom to shower. Groggy with sleep, you turn on the water and take off your nightgown. As you are about to get in the shower, you see yourself in the full-length mirror. “Yuck!” you say. “I feel so fat.” You are not alone! Every moment of every day millions of women of varying sizes and shapes are saying some variation of the phrase – “I feel fat.” This thought might come when you’re getting dressed, or when you catch a glimpse of yourself in a shop window. You might be daydreaming while waiting for an appointment and find yourself thinking, “My God, my thighs are disgusting.” You might have just finished a pretty normal meal, and think, “My stomach feels really huge right now.” So how do these “bad body” thoughts affect you? Close your eyes a minute and think about the past 24 hours. Think about getting out of bed in the morning, taking your shower, getting dressed, and heading out the door. Think about any interactions you might have had with friends in class or at workout or practice, or at work. Think about buying, preparing, and eating food and how you felt after you ate. Pay attention to the feelings in your body as you remember these thoughts. I’ve had many women say things like, “I look revolting or disgusting.” “I’m weak or I’m out of control.” “I hate to have people see me.” “Nothing fits me.” “I feel so fat I want to die.” What does it mean when a woman says, in one way or another, “I feel fat”? Unfortunately it is a feeling most of us understand. Because we live in a society where fat is looked on as being really disgusting, each time a woman says, “I feel fat, she is saying, “There is something wrong with me.” Each time she feels fat, she is feeling self-hatred and disgust. An alarming fact was brought to light back in 1984 when Glamour magazine conducted a survey of 33,000 women in which 75% of those between 18 and 35 said they were overweight. In actuality, only 25% were overweight according to standardized height and weight charts. Furthermore, 45% of the underweight women thought they were too fat. These same women chose losing 10-15 pounds above success in work or in love as their most desired goal. In the November 1987 issue of New Body Magazine, another study reported that 95% of all women ranged from disgusted to disappointed with their bodies. 29% said they would rather be bald than fat, and 25% said they would give up their job, money, even a man, to lose weight. The thinness trend did not slow down in the 90’s or in the early part of 2000. In fact, the ideal image portrayed for women is getting even further away from reality. 25 years ago models weighed 8% less than the average woman in North America. At that time the average woman was five feet, three inches tall and weighed 144 pounds. Today’s models are 23% below that weight and young girls want to be more like them. One modeling agency revealed that in its search for models, of the 40,000 pictures submitted, only four met the agency’s criteria. Our image of beauty has changed from the more sensuous and curvy Marilyn Monroe to the sticklike Twiggy and Kate Moss. Consider that our Miss Americas, Playboy playmates, ballerinas, fashion models, and movie stars have steadily been decreasing in weight since the 60’s and that Americans are spending $33 billion a year to take weight off. In 1961, the Playboy playmate of the year weighed 137 pounds and was approximately 5’8’’ tall. The February 1990 playmate was five feet, seven inches tall and weighed 105 pounds. To understand our obsession with thinness, body shape and weight, we must look at what might be some of the things that are going on in a person’s mind. Some of these things might be a set of very rigid rules that a person has made for themselves. Someone may demand of herself that she never eat more than 600 calories a day. Another girl may use the rule that eating will make you fat, so it must be avoided at all costs. Still another may believe that she is not allowed to eat unless she exercises so she requires this of herself. It’s not only dieting and restricting that is a problem. Exercise or working out is too often approached with a nonsensical, oppressive, compulsive, and even dangerous attitude by the young women (and men as well!) who do this. For females, the fitness craze has much more to do with the pursuit of thinness than with the pursuit of fitness. In Compulsive Exercise and Eating Disorders, Alayne Yates discusses this issue and refers to the Glamour magazine study in 1984 of 33,000 women readers that revealed that 95% of the respondents exercised to control their weight, not to improve their health. I wonder what kind of numbers a comparable study today would show! One example of goal-oriented thinking and behavior that has been distorted is the current craze of body composition or body fat testing. For example there is a story I heard about a gym in California that conducts routine body fat testing for all members. It recently awarded a first place ribbon to a 16 year old girl named Katie, an anorexic patient of a therapist I know. The ribbon was for having the lowest body fat of all female gym members. Katie had 9% body fat. Katie also had heart problems, she was not menstruating, and she had recently been discharged from an inpatient eating disorder program. Upon discharge from the hospital, Katie signed up at the gym, where no screening procedures take place. She was exercising against the advice of her doctor and yet she won a fitness award! This is a very sad commentary on our society and a real paradox. Katie poignantly said, “You say I’m not healthy, you say I’m at risk, yet I win the award in my gym for fitness. It’s making me crazy! Who do I believe?” Our cultural fixation on the ideal female figure and appearance, especially thinness, has infiltrated and damaged women’s sports, so that female athletes are often judged by how they look as much as by how they perform. In this arena, we find the extreme of the “fit or fanatic” spectrum, but we mustn’t forget that the extreme indicates the direction or goal towards which all are encouraged to aspire. Ballerinas, skaters, and gymnasts are the most obvious examples. Consider the following scenario. If you watched the 1992 Olympics, you saw female gymnasts whose average age was 16, whose average height was four feet, nine inches, and whose average weight was 83 pounds. In 1976, the female gymnasts looked quite different – their average age was 17, they were 6 inches taller, and 23 pounds heavier than those of today. In her book, “Little Girls in Pretty Boxes,” Joan Ryan exposes the truth behind the scenes regarding many (not all) elite female athletes. Ryan quotes gymnastics trainer Jack Rockwell. He said, “I remember a top American official saying to Mary Lou Retton a year after the (1984) Olympics, ‘You know, if I could, I’d take a half a point off just because of that fat hanging off of your butt.’” Strenuous exercise combined with poor eating can have severe and often unforeseen consequences. Close to two thirds of female college athletes have irregular or nonexistent periods, a condition known as amenorrhea. This often begins with disordered eating. Amenorrhea, is also a sign for increased risk for osteoporosis (brittle bones). The rate of bone loss can be alarming. An absence of menstruation means an absence of estrogen, which means bones can’t develop properly. This can have a profound effect on a girl’s skeletal development, since 48-70% of bone mass and 15% of height are achieved during adolescence. A 23-year old bulimic client was recently tested for bone density and was told that it matched that of a 65-year-old woman. A 21-year-old anorexic runner, who was not menstruating, tested with a bone density of an 80-year-old woman. Newsday magazine recently ran an article called Danger and Mystery – the story of the Female Athlete Triad. The triad is made up of three factors: 1. Disordered eating which can lead to 2. Amenorrhea, or lack of menstruation, which is a sign of increased risk for 3. Osteoporosis or brittle bones. The presence of any one of these risk factors can put the female athlete (or people who exercise compulsively) at risk for the triad and she should be screened for the other two. Many female athletes suffering from these disorders face a fundamental dilemma: Intense pressure to excel sometimes leads to behavior that causes health risks, making success more difficult and dangerous to achieve. This balance between health and athletic success can create conflicts for coaches as well. For someone who is not an athlete, excessive exercise does the very same thing. I talk to so many women on the phone who can’t imagine not doing aerobic exercise while in treatment. They say, “Well! It’s healthy!” It usually begins with disordered eating, ranging in severity from anorexia or bulimia to common chronic dieting. Poor or inadequate nutrition, combined with the intense training done by many female athletes, can cause “energy deficit.” This occurs when the energy expended is greater than the energy taken in. Energy deficit causes the body to shut down production of several hormones necessary to make estrogen. The lack of estrogen, in turn, triggers loss of menstruation. This happens, on average, when a woman’s body fat drops below 17 to 18 percent. By contrast, experts say, a male’s body fat can fall to 1 percent with very little medical consequence. The lack of estrogen in an athlete who is not menstruating, combined with lack of calcium in many women’s diets, results in loss of bone density. If the bones deteriorate enough, the result is osteoporosis. This has been a tremendous amount of information for you this month. Eat healthily. Work with a nutritionist if that is helpful for you. I have treated enough athletes to know that you really do perform better if you eat well – eat a healthy diet, low in fat (notice I didn’t say no fat). If you find you have any of the symptoms of the Female Athlete Triad, don’t hesitate to go to your physician or a therapist. It is not saying that you’re a failure or you’re bad because you’re having problems with any of these things – It is a real act of self-caring to recognize it. It is saying, “I really care about myself. I want to be the very best I can be.”
$3,000 You're Worth It! Scholarship Sweepstakes! Mirasol believes in following your dreams, and therefore wants to help those who have taken the initiative to pursue their education! We know “You Can Do It!"Whether you're going back to school, just starting out, or anywhere in-between, if you're looking for money for a two- or four-year degree, don't forget to enter the 2005 Mirasol "You're Worth It! Scholarship" sweepstakes today for your chance to win up to $3,000 to pursue your dreams! Here's how it works: Sign up to receive our monthly newsletter "The Sunflower", giving us a little bit of information about yourself. Be sure you are a female at least 15 years old and planning or currently attending an accredited US high school, university or college. Entry deadline is October 31, 2005. We'll randomly pick one $3,000 first prize and two $1,000 second prize winners on or around November 15, 2005. Prizes will be paid directly to the winners' selected schools. Don't wait, click here to enter today!
The Recipe Section: A Guide to Meaningful Eating Sandwich and Salad
|
1-888-520-1700 or (520) 615-9323 or information@mirasol.net © 2005 Mirasol, Inc. All Rights Reserved.