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Celebs causing teens to diet

Jul 9, 2004 6:33 PM

Australians are constantly being told they are getting too fat, while being fed a steady diet of pictures depicting too-thin celebrities.

Stars of the screen and stage such as Lara Flynn Boyle, Kirstie Alley and Daniel Johns have battled to maintain a healthy weight, but how does the super-thin ideal influence the behaviour of the most vulnerable consumers of popular culture?

Three-quarters of Australian teenagers are a normal weight or slightly underweight, yet research shows the same number of adolescent girls want to be thinner and up to 60% of girls and young women regularly engage in unhealthy weight loss behaviours.

Eating Disorder Foundation chair and co-author of Australia's guidelines for the treatment of eating disorders, Amanda Jordan, said many teens are savvy about the dangers of eating disorders but some are swayed by images of skinny celebrities.

"These figures in our society who are promoted as successful are invariably beautiful, blonde, caucasian and thin," Jordan said.

"The definition is very, very narrow and people - be they a little kid at school who doesn't get noticed right through to

someone who aspires to be rich and famous themselves - take on that model of success and try to emulate it.

"It creates an environment which puts teenagers more at risk."

Weight-watching and eating disorders have been an issue for celebrities for years.

Many publications regularly feature stories about celebrities deemed to have lost, or gained, too much weight.

But Sydney University associate professor in media studies Catherine Lumby disputes suggestions that magazine readers are so easily taken in.

"I think the media overestimates its own role in this," said Lumby.

"It is clear that one of the key things that young women are very aware of as a result of the media they consume is the phenomena of eating disorders because the media is obsessed with eating disorders.

"They are very, very educated in debates about body image and the media and eating disorders."

To their credit, most magazines portray eating disorders as pathological behaviour instead of the norm, Lumby said.

"Those stories, if you read them closely, are always about the dangers of becoming too obsessed with image," she said.

In recent weeks, the issue has come to a head in Australia, after America's most famous twins Mary-Kate and Ashley Olsen were forced to cancel a promotional trip to Melbourne, with one half of the duo admitted to a treatment facility for an eating disorder.

"Mary-Kate has been struggling for quite some time," sister Ashley told Australia's Who Weekly magazine.

Ashley said her sister's malaise was unrelated to being one of the most recognised young celebrities in the world, or running a multi-million dollar empire at the age of 18.

"It has nothing to do with working hard or being successful," she said.

"This is an issue that a girl down the street can have. It's an issue a lot of people deal with."

About two in every 100 Australians develop some kind of eating disorder during their lives, and girls and women between the ages of 14 and 25 are most at risk.

Experts agree a cluster of factors contributes to putting somebody at risk of developing an eating disorder such as bulimia nervosa, where food is thrown up soon after it is ingested, or anorexia nervosa, in which eating is avoided.

"Constantly seeing ultra-thin celebrities creates an at-risk environment where people who in other ways are dissatisfied with themselves, unhappy or who haven't found effective ways of dealing with their problems will be inspired to more determined dieting," Jordan said.

"To some teenagers the message from what's happened to Mary-Kate Olsen would be that you can never be too rich, too famous or too beautiful - you have to add on thinness.

"That's a very alarming message."

Australia's Nicole Kidman has also been the subject of rumours and speculation over her eating habits, particularly in recent months after the Oscar winner was photographed looking extremely thin.

In a recent interview in the United Kingdom, the naturally lean Kidman said her hairstyles often created the illusion of her being too thin.

"I've been wearing it up a lot lately and that seems to make my face look smaller and make my body look even thinner," she told Now magazine.

"I've had this long, lean body shape since my teens. I can't do anything about it."

Although young women remain most at risk of developing eating disorders, young men are increasingly feeling similar pressures to aspire to the perceived body beautiful.

About 10% of Australians with eating disorders are men and boys, and in an era of diet fixation, chiselled underwear models and a culture of muscularity, research suggests eating problems among men are on the rise.

Former Silverchair frontman Daniel Johns, 26, recently spoke of his near fatal struggle with teenage anorexia, telling ABC TV's Andrew Denton food "was just the enemy".

Weighing just 50 kilograms at his lowest ebb, Johns said doctors had warned him he was going to die.

"I could somehow convince myself that apples contained razor blades and wouldn't go to restaurants because I thought every chef in the world wanted to poison me," he said.

"Food was the enemy. I hated the look of it, the smell of it. If anyone talked about it, I'd leave the room."

Treating food as the enemy can have dire health consequences.

"It's commonly canvassed as a problem that you just grow out of but that's not true - the people who are dying of anorexia nervosa tend to be those with long chronic histories over the course of 10 or 15 years," Jordan said.

"Even if you recover, you can end up not achieving your potential height, sometimes people don't progress through puberty or have very delayed puberty, you can definitely get problems with fertility later on, you can have bone loss and early-onset osteoporosis, you can get cardiac problems."

As Australians continue to eat up images of skinny stars in glossy magazines, experts have said it may be of little use focusing on the causes of eating disorders after a person develops such a condition.

Instead, the focus should be firmly fixed on a healthy recovery.