promo for Thin by Lauren Greenfield
November 11, 2009
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Introduction to Women's Studies
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November 11, 2009
promo for Thin by Lauren Greenfield
November 12, 2009 at 2:23 pm
Body image is such a huge issue in women because i feel that most women’s goals are to fit that image of being a beautiful women with no flaws. These women are so caught up on the way that other women look that they compare everything back to their bodies which creates eating disorders and other health problems for these women. I have seen and even dated women with eating disorders and noticed that these women do have problems dealing with daily activities because of the stress from the eating disorder. I was scared to even break up with my ex-girlfriend because i did not want her to become overly depressed.
What struck me the most in the click was that the doctor said that eating disorders normally have nothing to do with the persons image. She said that it most occurs when outside problems conflict with the person causing these problem to stem off in different directions. I use to think that eating disorders seem to always occur in people who were unhappy with their weight or size but i was proven wrong.
November 13, 2009 at 11:45 pm
I remember watching this on HBO when it first came out. I also remember my mom coming and telling me this is not something I should be watching. I was confused as to why she would say that because I think this shows an important message to all girls. These unhealthily thin women are not even happy when they get to be the thinness they want (or close to it). If more emphasis in the media was put on healthy weights or more buxom figures, there would be far less harsh effects on girls and women today. I have a very close family friend who is only 12 years old and suffers from an eating disorder. 12 is so young to have already figured out that you want to be super thin. I think it also comes from mothers and how much emphasis is put on the newest exercise fad or diet. Especially in my town, women are extremely fit , spending hours in the gym or specialized fitness classes just because they can. It seems weird to me that there seems to be a lack in balance in women’s lives who feel the only thing important in life is how you look. The women featured in “thin” will never (so it seems) be happy with their weight and until they realize that they will never be able to move forward in their lives. I wish these women could realize that life is about living and eating and enjoying what you eat. Everything in moderation. Also, peoples bodies are always different, every woman is built differently, this is something we cannot change and seeing super thing models on t.v. and examining their successes only puts a damper on these fragile minds, forcing them back into old habits, old ways.
November 14, 2009 at 1:16 am
I think what really hit home with me this video but also what we talked about in regards of the starving daughters and the doctor visits. There were a few things that really stuck in my mind. While reading the article I kept thinking, that’s not me, that’s not me, that’s not me until… bam the specific idea that hit me was the idea of “never being full” and “collapsing from exhaustion.” I feel like there are more times than not when I find myself hungry… not for food, but for knowledge or for peace or for attention. I stay up at night sometimes wondering… is this it? is that all? now what? I crave more in my life. Is it that I am greedy? Is it that I am an overachiever? Have I been conditioned to think like this? Is this the new norm? It really makes think about what you have in life, what you want, and what you perhaps take for granted. This hunger exhausts us this constand search for more, to do better, to be successful causes us to exhaust. We never stop and rest we just keep plugging until…. we have a break down in the middle of the Dean’s office, or fight with our boyfriend or parent, or flip out on a friend… sound familiar? I know I’ve done it and I am not proud of it but sometimes a little sleep, some exercise, and a yummy meal just isn’t enough for some girls hense I feel like this is where the disorders come from… they can’t control the amount of hw they have, or their grade on an exam, or the way their friends have been treating them lately but they can control the food they eat or don’t eat etc…
I know some of us mentioned in the blogs that we have definitely gone though similar praise or repremanding from our doctors as some of these women have. I mentioned that after a semester abroad walking everyday, eating healthy, and feeling great about myself I came home to find out that I had gained 5 pounds and that I needed to watch it…… now I know that muscle weighs more than fat so I convinced myself that that was the case but I still felt pretty ashamed of myself. I worked hard all summer eating right and going to the gym and I loved it! I felt great again both on the outside and on the inside! I couldn’t help but think “take that doctor… 5 pounds my ass” but should I really have had to feel that way? I know it’s part of their job to tell us where we are health wise weight wise but I wish there was another way to do it…. I actually still can’t believe drs. still only rely on the scale to measure weight when we know that it’s really your BMI that should be calculated. Why don’t they ever use those little machines to get the total muscle/organ/ fat breakdown?
I broke down when I saw that one women in the video at the drs. she was completely skin and bones and it made me so sad because I feel like I know poeple like that. I’ve definitely seen them, we all have. I felt so helpless, so weak when I see them. The women I see like this at the mall and the zoo… do they know that they are dying of hunger? I feel as if part of me is dying with them.
I don’t feel like I have anything critical to say, I just wanted to express my thoughts.
November 14, 2009 at 9:33 pm
After seeing this short documentary, I was bothered by the fact that these young girls think they have to be slim in order to be liked by someone. beauty isn’t just the exterior it is also skin deep!
The media makes teens believe that everyone should be slim. as a result, teens try to find any way possible to be skinny. Girls cut their wrists, dont eat, and force themselves to purge. Young girls should not be fooled by the media and live their lives the way they want to live it.
Life is all about making CHOICES, we shouldn’t let media and society take control over us!
November 16, 2009 at 3:57 am
Body image is so prevalent in our media today and I don’t think the right message is being portrayed to women. I was just reading today in OK magazine about the Ralph Lauren model that got fired for being “fat”, the model was 5’8″ and 120. I just find it so disgusting the media has made this mold for body image and anyone that doesn’t fit into it is not attractive. When watching the Thin documentary I found it interesting that some women talked about becoming thin to feel attractive and some wanted to be thin because they were abused and didn’t want to be “touched” again. I feel so helpless when I hear these young girls say this because we have no one to blame but ourselves for creating this image. My mother always told beauty is skin deep and I truly believe that. Documentaries like Thin are sending the right message to young teens going through the issue of body image. Our media and society might make the mold of how we should look, talk and act but nothing will change unless we as a community start changing this image of “thin”.
November 16, 2009 at 10:37 pm
This documentary was really upsetting to watch because eating disorders are so prevalent in our culture and it is disgusting how the media tends to glamorize anorexia and the importance of being super thin. What Kaileigh says about the polo model being fired for being too fat shows how important being thin is in our culture and how it is so closely related to what we consider beautiful. The story about the girl who had an eating disorder starting in the 4th/5th grade is so shocking- little girls should not have to worry about their weight and spend their years growing up consumed with food issues. I started to cringe watching the overly thin girl mark out her “problem areas” covering almost every inch of her body in black marker with words like ” not tone enough”. In Abra Chernik’s The Body Project she also spends countless years writing in her journal about her daily activities and having the pages consumed with eating issues and not doing certain things because she had to work out or didn’t want to eat foods at restaurants. It is so sad to revolve your life around weight and food and being tormented by your own body. We as a culture should be doing anything but glamorizing this. Maybe we should hire “real size” models instead of firing the overly thin ones for being too fat. We need to create a new sense of the “perfect body” so that it is attainable and not constricting.
November 17, 2009 at 1:11 am
The topic of eating disorders is something that is very difficult to discuss…body image in today’s society is something that we are all exposed to every single day. After reading the Chernik and Martin articles last week, I haven’t been able to stop thinking about this very controversial, yet very intriguing, topic. Eating disorders are intriguing to me because I am fascinated by what goes through these girls’ minds…how they waste their lives obsessed with being under 100 pounds. I know that these are awful disorders but while I can understand what these girls are going through (I haven’t met one girl in my entire life who is completely confident with the way she looks), I can’t wrap my head around their thinking. How did their thinking take such an extreme turn that they came to be this way? The most disturbing thing to me was the girl in this video who sheepishly admits putting a syringe in her FEEDING TUBE to get the “food” that is being forced into her body out. While she is trying to recover from anorexia, she can’t fathom the idea of food entering her body…so she injects a syringe into THE FEEDING TUBE THAT IS KEEPING HER ALIVE????! Someone explain this to me.
Anorexia/bulimia is something that is so common in our society today. Whether diagnosed or undiagnosed, it is everywhere. Girls and women are trying to be like these “healthy” celebrities who weigh next to nothing by starving their bodies. I took the liberty of doing a little research of my own by checking out some pro ana/mia websites. My results? Astonishing. If you type “anorexia/bulimia tips” into google, the pages they lead you to are horrifying. Girls and women communicate with one another, graduating eachother for only drinking herbal tea and eating sugarfree gum for three weeks and offering tips to stay away from food. Some of the more gruesome “tips” I read were: “When you feel like you need to eat, watch a gory movie like ‘Hostel 2′ and you are guaranteed to lose your appetite’ OR “Buy an skimpy outfit that is far too small..then fast until it is baggy on you”.
I couldn’t believe my eyes. When will these girls realize that they are going too far? Even if they are given help, when will they realize that they need to completely change their mindsets? In our online chat, people commented that this is completely a choice and anorexia is something that these girls chose to have. I disagree… until WE can change the way that body image is projected in the media, the numbers for anorexia and bulimia will keep going up. Young girls aren’t choosing this lifestyle; they are responding to the “perfect body” that the media tells them they must achieve.
November 17, 2009 at 2:37 pm
After watching this video I was left with so many emotions, mainly sadness. It is so terrible that our society can mentally and physically tear someone apart…watching things like this gives me a greater understanding on how eating disorders are not a choice, it is a mental sickness that cannot be changed with out help. Why is it that these girls feel that “thin” is beautiful??? it is because of the media and what our society constructs as what looks good and what doesn’t. At a young age girls watch movies with princesses and are surrounded with barbies and other dolls, all that are thin. These movies show young girls that being thin is pretty and in most of these movies these princesses are always swept off their feet by a handsome prince. What kind of message does this give us women?? is this what we are supposed to be like… does thin=beauty??
The last part of this clip really hit me. This girl is comparing herself to the girls at her school..The media has caused women to try and be what is looked at as perfect, which threatens an individual’s health because some women go to extremes just to be thin.. For example Audrey Brashich addresses the issue with our media and the way it affects girls at such a young age. She brings up the problem with the change in Dora’s physical appearance in the cartoon Dora the Explorer. The way she was looked when the show first came out showed that maybe the media is moving in the right direction with the messages it sends out, but now she is different….she is “prettified.” The media affects women of all ages and needs to start moving in a new direction and people need to address this like Audrey Brashich did because it’s problem that cannot be ignored. “Thin” is not the only way to look that is beautiful.
November 17, 2009 at 6:13 pm
This short documentary is one of the most emotionally striking film I have seen. It was so surprising to see women my age and younger struggling so much with their weight and hearing that it affects women at such a young age is really upsetting. What scared me the most were the girls who were drawing what they thought their bodies looked like on paper, because what they had drawn is so much bigger than their actual body size. It is so strange to think that women can really believe that they are fat when they are less than 100 pounds and almost skin and bones. I used to believe that anorexic people can just change back to the way they were by just eating normally again, but it is not that simple. But now I realize that it is actually a disorder in their mind that affects the way they think.
I feel as though most women have experienced some form of self-consciousness about their weight, but no to the same extent that these young women have. Some of them start ‘dieting’ because they want a better body, some do so because they ‘don’t want to be seen,’ as one girl who was molested as a child stated. When I saw the teenagers sitting in the room crying about wanting to be thin it struck me that almost everyone goes through feelings of self-doubt and bad body images. Anorexia really has to do with control, and when all of these teens are going through so much stress and work with school, they feel the need to have power over some part of their life, so they pick food to help them, but in the end it is what hurts them the most.
November 18, 2009 at 2:51 am
This video is very hard to watch because it’s so sad that these girls have distorted images of themselves. It’s even sadder that the main reason for this is the media because of the way they depict women. To be perfect you must be skinny. The scene in which the girl outlined how big she thought her body was and her body was way smaller than her outline, was scary to me and how they started to circle sections of the outline and pin point areas which she wished were smaller. These girls need a lot psychological help and if the media would move away from these size 0 models, girls wouldn’t be some self-conscience. I found very astonishing was the girl who started to have bad images about herself starting at the 4th grade when girls shouldn’t be caring about body image at 9 years old.
November 20, 2009 at 1:57 am
I definitely agree with Isias when he says that “girls think they have to be thin in order to be liked by someone.” Also, we can go on and on about how prevalent it is in our society, how beauty is only skin deep, how we totally disagree with it, blah blah blah. I think that the redundancy that comes along with discussing body image as well as the subject of eating disorders should be taken out of the equation. Just like everyone has different motives for going to the grocery store, to get bread or milk or whatever, people have different motives for everything they do…unfortunately all revolving around sex and money.
This society facilitates the type of behavior that results in tendencies towards eating disorders and simply, unhealthy living. For example, women that are thin have a much higher chance in getting into a graduate school than an overweight person. This is reality. It’s not only the skinny models that are being effected by this ideology…it’s even the girl in your chem class that’s starving to lose weight in time for her interview at med school. It is the young post-pubescent adolescent that developed much earlier than the other girls in her class and are socially ostracized for it. It is the woman you see jogging down the street who is so bogged down with anxiety and depression, feeling absolutely no control over her life except for what she puts in and out of her body.
Generations and generations of women are being effected by this. In my opinion, eating disorders and issues with body image is not just about what’s the “in thing” and what’s hot right now. It goes deeper than that and I’m not actually sure how deep it is. Like the cliché says, “your body is your temple” and reflections of what one views themselves on the outside and whether than reflection is good or bad, it’s kinda hard to say that it’s just an external appearance. I’m not vein by any means but I still go through the same motions that other women do everyday.
December 7, 2009 at 5:07 pm
I think this movie excels in showing that anorexia/bulemia and other eating disorders aren’t all just about being thin. I thought the strongest scene in the film was when the girl had to draw what she thought her body looked like and then have herself traced inside. It goes to show that the issue is not just being thin but it is a mental issue- these diseases prevent women from connecting with their bodies. Not only do they see themselves as bigger than they actually are when they look in a mirror or see any reflection, but they lose touch with what a healthy body feels like. Women, for example, often lose their periods, their hair falls out, teeth and nails turn yellow, etc. There are so many side effects that the body isn’t even part of the girl, it is a cage that she feels she must control.
As I have a few friends who have had severe eating disorders, and I am so lucky to say they have all been successfully treated, this video really hit home for me because the information wasn’t new. I knew about the body tracing and about the meetings and interventions. I also knew that eating disorders are a mental issue beyond just poor body image. Eating disorders are a tunnel with no light at the end. A person with an eating disorder rarely gets to the point where she/he is thin enough- there is always work to be done. What I loved is that this movie gave the audience all of that information. As I learned with my friends there isn’t much a friend can do other than suggest help. Even at that, a person with an eating disorder needs to want help. Too often are eating disorders passed off in society as a thing that effects crazy girls who just want to be thin. Thanks to this video I think more people will recognize that it is far more serious and far more complicated than that.
December 8, 2009 at 3:34 am
This video disgusted me and made me sad. I just don’t understand eating disorders. What would make a person starve themselves or throw up after every meal to fulfill this certain image. Actually, I guess I know why people would do this but it just seems so radical and crazy to actually do it. I agree with everything everyone has to say about this, eating disorders are a tough subject. For me how I see it is that people want to be thin thats a good and a bad thing. I think if someone wants to lose weight thats great for them tryin to make a change for the better but you shouldnt go about doing this by not eating properly. There are so many ways to slim down and eating disorders are not the right way by any means. I think there is also def a down side to wanting to be thin, wanting it for the wrong reason. People shouldnt be pressured or convinced they have to be thin to be liked. Beauty isnt on the exterior. You should want to be thin to for yourself not for other people. And this is what causes things like eating disorders. In todays society where it is so stressed to be thin people will start to become “crazy” and obsessed about doing this. Its stupid and I feel very sad for these people that it comes to that for them. And I think that in this society its hard to talk about theser things and fix them.