Case Study: The girl in the magazine
I picked up an issue of Cosmopolitan. Flipped through the first pages and my eyes came upon a woman looking so damn gorgeous and content - like she had no worries in the whole wide world. Why should she? She had luscious shiny hair, a flawless complexion and a killer body. I felt an itch of jealousy. That was when I realised for the first time that I cared about the way I looked.
My grandmother came to visit the following summer. After we hugged she took one look at me and exclaimed, “ You’ve gained weight!” I put on a brave face and laughed but on the inside, my self-esteem sunk to minus 10. From then on whenever I looked in the mirror, I felt like a failure. A fat failure.
My dislike for food gradually increased, whilst I was getting smaller - both on the outside and inside. I stopped socialising because I feared that I might eat something fattening. I shut myself out of the world, so I would be alone, miserable and not eating. I wanted to be good enough for my grandmother and everybody else.
The funny thing is I never took notice of my dramatic weight loss. My friends and family commented, “You’ve lost weight!” and my initial thought was, “Yes! Now I can eat cookies again” but my fear of losing control eventually suppressed my cravings. Even a tiny square of chocolate was enough for me to panic. I visualised it as having horns and 5oz weight gain as its side effect. For every bite I took, my mind went, “I’ll get fat”.
It got to the point that I would eat an apple for lunch and my periods stopped. It was not until I was put in front of a doctor in a hospital, that I realised that for every bite I didn’t take, I took a step closer to death.
This is a first-hand experience of an eating disorder caused by an unhappy body image. I never thought I would be one of the statistics that I had read about in a magazine a year before.
When I went to fashion design school, I was skinny compared to my classmates, but normal according to fashion magazines and the size 0 models that came for fittings.
It was good that I was at fashion school at this stage and not when I was heavier, otherwise my depression would have just rocketed. I can understand why an average woman feels ugly and fat when looking at the goddess-like models on billboards and magazines.
The thing is, it isn’t real.
Illusion and fantasy are part of the fashion world. Most people have body issues. In a world, where models yo-yo between being too thin or too overweight as fast as the trends they depict, it is not up to the fashion business to determine how a woman should look.
I have gained back weight, and I have tons more confidence than when I was skinny three years ago. Still, I feel that itch whenever I look at rock hard abs, but stopping me from going back to my illness is what I now know that I didn’t back then. That being thin does not solve everything.
