{"id":4747,"date":"2011-04-07T05:05:44","date_gmt":"2011-04-07T03:05:44","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/blog.ultimatefatburner.com\/?p=4747"},"modified":"2015-12-07T11:51:57","modified_gmt":"2015-12-07T16:51:57","slug":"survey-young-women-trade-years-life-thin","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.ultimatefatburner.com\/ufb-blog\/survey-young-women-trade-years-life-thin\/","title":{"rendered":"Survey: Many Young Women Would Trade Years of Life to Be Thin"},"content":{"rendered":"

This is sad.<\/a><\/p>\n

Almost one-third of young women would trade at least a year of their lives to have a perfect body, according to a new survey of British undergraduates.<\/p>\n

The survey found that 16 percent of young women queried said they’d trade a year of life for their ideal body weight and shape. Ten percent were willing to trade two to five years, and 2 percent were willing to trade up to 10 years of life away. One percent said they would give up 21 years or more.<\/p>\n

…The majority of the women surveyed were dissatisfied with how they looked, the researchers found. Although 78 percent of the women sampled were normal weight \u2014 or even underweight \u2014 79 percent of the survey group said they wanted to lose weight. Only 3 percent said they’d like to gain weight.<\/p>\n

Negative thoughts about body image were almost universal: 93 percent of the women said they had negative thoughts about their appearance within the last week. Almost one-third had those thoughts several times a day. Almost half of all women surveyed said these pressures weren’t entirely internal: 46 percent had experienced ridicule or bullying<\/a> because of their appearance.<\/p>\n

In addition, 39 percent of the women surveyed said they would have cosmetic surgery if money was not an option. Three-quarters of those women wanted multiple procedures.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Reminds me of a conversation I had with my 18-year-old daughter recently. She got a solicitation in the mail to subscribe to “Teen Vogue” – which she’d never heard of. So she asked me about it. I laughed, and\u00a0responded by showing\u00a0her this post by women’s studies professor Hugo Schwyzer<\/a>:<\/p>\n

Tweens and teens grow up comparing themselves to models and tv stars. Few girls feel as pretty, as sexy, as skinny as the women they see in the media. As a result, many young women conclude that happiness is something that you only get when you get to your goal weight. And even more troublingly, when it comes to relationships, lots of straight girls think that if their own bodies aren\u2019t perfect, they have no right to expect too much from guys.<\/p>\n

Working with high school and college-aged young women, I\u2019ve heard the same thing more and more often in recent years. These smart and amazing young women have somehow gotten the idea that in order to be treated with respect and love, they have to be damn near perfect. One student said to me last year, \u201cIf I were fifteen pounds thinner, I think my boyfriend would stop looking at other girls.\u201d She didn\u2019t feel like she had the right to ask her guy to stop checking out other women in public. \u201cYou have to be gorgeous for a man to want to be with you and only you. I\u2019m not, so I can\u2019t expect that.\u201d<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

After she read it, I said “That’s<\/em> what Teen Vogue is about: undermining your confidence at an early age\u00a0to sell cosmetics and other consumer products.” She looked up from the computer screen, shook her head and said “I have so much to thank you for, Mom.”<\/p>\n

Needless to state, she tossed the Vogue envelope in the trash. It’s a pity that more young women don’t do the same. Teen Vogue is hardly the only or worst offender, when it comes to unrealistic portrayals of women, but it’s certainly representative of the genre.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

This is sad. Almost one-third of young women would trade at least a year of their lives to have a perfect body, according to a new survey of […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":[],"categories":[26,28,29],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.ultimatefatburner.com\/ufb-blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4747"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.ultimatefatburner.com\/ufb-blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.ultimatefatburner.com\/ufb-blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.ultimatefatburner.com\/ufb-blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.ultimatefatburner.com\/ufb-blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=4747"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/www.ultimatefatburner.com\/ufb-blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4747\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":10367,"href":"https:\/\/www.ultimatefatburner.com\/ufb-blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4747\/revisions\/10367"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.ultimatefatburner.com\/ufb-blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=4747"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.ultimatefatburner.com\/ufb-blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=4747"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.ultimatefatburner.com\/ufb-blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=4747"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}