With eating disorders on the rise today, the media plays an important role in affecting self-esteem, leading a large amount of young adults to develop eating disorders. Many adolescents see the overbearing thin celebrities and try to reach media's level of thinness and ideal body weight. "Sixty-nine of the girls reported that magazine pictures influenced their idea of the perfect body shape" (Field). Not only is being thin associated with other positive characteristics such as, lovable, popular, beautiful, and sexy, but being overweight is connected with negative characteristics like fat, ugly, unpopular, and lazy. Therefore media is the distinct social pressure of operating to influence people to be thin and causing eating disorders. …show more content…

Some people will do whatever it takes to fit in to today's society, including developing eating disorders.
Every person has their own idea of what a perfect body would look like. How do they develop these ideas, they retrieve them from what the media feeds them. A study found that girls who were frequent readers of fashion magazines were two to three times more likely than infrequent readers to loose weight because of a magazine article to feel that magazine influence what they thought was the ideal body type (Field). Not only does the media influence eating disorders, it influence readers and viewers on what the ideal body type is. This shows how big of an impact the media has on people's thoughts and views.
Through out the United States there is a craze over weight loss. Whether it's an infomercial selling a exercising machine, new diet pills, slimming clothing lines, or the new ‘fad' diet the message being sent to American's is everyone needs to loose weight. The media is stuffed with numerous types of weight loss methods. Magazine cover's have headlines titles ‘Get flat abs in five minutes' or ‘Diet of the century', when adolescents read these articles they are being encouraged to pressured into losing weight, whether if they need to or not. A study of one teen magazine found all articles contained in the magazines included statements