Notes on a Nervous Planet(35)
Yes, people might end up buying a diet book to get the body of a model who endorses it, or a perfume to be more like the image of a celebrity whose name is on the bottle, but that all comes at a cost that is more than financial. People might feel better in the instant hit of the purchase, but in the long term it just feeds a craving to be someone else: someone more glamorous, more attractive, more famous. We are encouraged out of ourselves, to want to have other lives. Lives that are no more real than pots of gold at the end of rainbows.
Maybe the beauty secret no magazine wants to tell us is that the best way to be happy with our looks is to accept the way we already look. We are in an age of Photoshop and cosmetic surgery and soon to be in an age of designer robots. It is probably the perfect time to accept our human quirks rather than trying to aim for the blank perfection of an android.
We might think: oh, I need to look a certain way to attract people. Or we could think: actually, there is no better way of filtering out the people who will be no good for me than by looking and being myself.
Being unhappy about your looks is not about your looks: when fashion models develop eating disorders it isn’t because they are ugly or overweight. Of course not.
There are various indicators worldwide that eating disorders are on the rise. The non-profit group Eating Disorder Hope reported in 2017 that eating disorders around the world have tended to rise in line with westernisation and industrialisation, and looked at a comprehensive overview of international research. In Asia, for instance, places like Japan, Hong Kong and Singapore have far higher rates than the Philippines, Malaysia and Vietnam, though those latter countries have rapidly rising rates as these countries ‘advance’ and ‘westernise’.
Another telling case is Fiji. Research there has found that eating disorders began to rise in the mid-nineties, just as TV was introduced to the South Pacific island state for the first time. The New York Times first reported back in 1999 how eating disorders in Fiji had been virtually unheard of, before TV gave them the slender role models of global hits such as Melrose Place and Beverly Hills 90210. Indeed, ‘you’ve gained weight’ used to be a common flattering compliment in Fiji, before American television gave girls and young women other body ideals.
In the UK, figures from NHS Digital in 2018 showed that hospital admissions from eating disorders had almost doubled within less than a decade, with girls and twenty-something women most at risk. Caroline Price, from the UK’s leading eating disorder charity Beat, told The Guardian at the time the figures were published that although eating disorders are ‘complex’ and down to ‘many factors’, modern culture has a lot to answer for.
‘Eating disorders are on the rise partly because of the challenges of today’s society,’ she said. ‘This includes social media and exam pressure.’
Although these things don’t entirely cause the problem, as experts like Price acknowledge, they compound it for those personalities predisposed to eating disorders. According to the UK’s National Centre for Eating Disorders (NCED), causal factors include genetics, parents with food issues, fat-teasing, childhood abuse or neglect, childhood trauma, family relationships, having a friend with an eating disorder, and, last but not least, the ‘culture’. Particularly problematic is a culture where there is always a new diet to try, and where, according to the NCED website, ‘a vulnerable individual internalises the impossibly ideal images they see on TV or in magazines, and continually compares herself unfavourably to those images’.
The website also adds that ‘people who can admire a beautiful model but say “I could never look like her but it doesn’t bother me too much” are the people who are least likely to fall victim to problems with food’. Maybe there is a lesson for all of us here: in that disconnect between the images we see and the selves we are. We need to build a kind of immune system of the mind, where we can absorb but not get infected by the world around us.
How to be kinder to yourself about yourself
1.Think of people you have loved. Think of the deepest relationships you have ever had. Think of the joy you felt when seeing those people. Think of how that joy had nothing to do with their looks except that they looked like themselves and you were pleased to see them. Be your own friend. Be pleased to recognise the person behind your face.
2.Change your perspective of how you view photos of yourself. Every photo you look at and think, Oh, I look old, will one day be a photo you look back on and think, Oh, I looked young. Instead of feeling old from the perspective of your younger self, try feeling young from the perspective of your older self.
3.Love imperfections. Accentuate them. They are what will make you different from androids and robots. ‘If you look for perfection, you will never be content,’ says Lvov’s wife, Natalie, in Anna Karenina.
4.Don’t try to be like someone who already exists. Enjoy your difference.
5.Don’t worry when people don’t like you. Not everyone will like you. Better to be disliked for being you, than being liked for being someone else. Life isn’t a play. Don’t rehearse yourself. Be yourself.
6.Project your thoughts outwards. Think of nature. Google pictures of Amazonian glass frogs. Place yourself in the natural order. There are 9 million known species and that is estimated as 20 per cent of the animals out there. Appreciate that life is beautiful. And you are, quite literally, alive. Ignore idiots with narrow definitions of beauty. They are blind to life's imperfect wonder.