Why Girls as Young as 9 Fear Fat and Go on Diets to Lose Weight
The girl looked down at her thin frame, held her hands in her lap and said, “I have too big legs and I don’t like my stomach.” Her classmates were asked whether they thought the girl was too heavy. A resounding “no” came from them, but the girl just sat there and nodded her head.
This revelation about being overweight did not come from someone in high school or even junior high, but a 9-year-old in the fourth grade at Manhattan Place Elementary School.
Young Dieters
A study released Tuesday affirms that girls are becoming more weight-conscious at an earlier age. It revealed that 50%of the 9-year-olds and close to 80%of the 10- and 11-year-olds surveyed said they diet to lose weight. The study, done by University of California San Francisco researchers, and presented at the annual meeting of the American Dietetic Assn. in Las Vegas, involved 500 girls (66% white) in grades four through 12 in San Francisco parochial schools who are from middle-income families.
Laurel Mellin, UCSF assistant clinical professor of family and community medicine and pediatrics, was the main author of the project along with Dr. Charles E. Irwin Jr. of the UCSF department of pediatrics, and Sarah Scully, formerly with UCSF.
Mellin devised the survey to see if eating disorders in older girls could be prevented at a younger age. To do that, she needed to find out what attitudes younger girls displayed toward dieting and body image.
‘Weightist Culture’
“We were very surprised at the findings,” she said. “We thought we’d find some problems, but not in such a profound way. The fear of fat is very disturbing, and the idea that many children had a pervasive fear of fat needs to be looked at.” She found that 31% of 9-year-olds worried that they were too fat now or feared they would become fat.
“Children are being socialized into a weightist culture,” Mellin said. “There is a general intolerance toward any deviation (in appearance.) It’s a reflection of the culture’s perfectionist attitudes toward image. That in and of itself is frightening.”
Like their San Francisco counterparts, Los Angeles area girls and boys worried about fat. In groups of about 20 or more, fourth-graders from Horace Mann in Beverly Hills, McKinley in Santa Monica, Manhattan Place in Los Angeles and fourth- through sixth-graders at Dixie Canyon in Sherman Oaks talked to a Times reporter about dieting, self-image and eating habits.
The students, who were of different socio-economic and ethnic backgrounds talked about parents, brothers and sisters who are constantly fighting their own weight battles, about exercising “to keep in shape,” about models in magazine ads who are so reed-thin they feel fat by comparison. They grapple with their own self-images, looking in the mirror and seeing a fat kid staring back. Roughly one-third of the students overall said they had dieted, but at least half said they were not pleased with they way they looked.
Said one girl from McKinley: “When I read magazines and look at the models, I would trade places with them. When you look at them, it makes you feel fat.”
Another girl at Manhattan Place, who was taller than the rest, big-boned but not heavy, said: “My mother works in dress designing and ladies will come over and try on clothes. They’re real thin and it makes me feel fat. My mother says I’m too fat. (When she does), I don’t say anything.”
And an 11-year-old from Dixie Canyon said, “I was in the doctor’s office reading Vogue magazine and there was a diet in there so I tore it out and took it home.”
Many of the children, both boys and girls, said they sometimes worked out along with exercise videotapes or shape-up programs on TV, but usually found the ones geared toward adults too difficult.
Skinny for Fashions
And when it comes to clothes, girls know that being skinny is essential for wearing certain styles. Stretch pants and leggings, for instance, aren’t for everyone. As one girl from Horace Mann put it, “You can’t wear those if you have one extra ounce of fat on your body.”
Some children diet because they think they are fat. In Mellin’s study, 58% of 9-year-olds perceived themselves as overweight, but the research team found that through analysis of height and weight data, only 17% of them were overweight. (A Glamour magazine reader survey conducted in 1984 found that 75% of the 18- to 35-year-old women who responded thought they were too fat. Only 25% of women that age actually are.)
They want to emulate the older models they see in fashion magazines, as well as their pop-culture heroes: Whitney Houston, Madonna, Cyndi Lauper, Cybill Shepherd, Christie Brinkley.
“They are comparing themselves to their role models, to the cultural standards of physical beauty, and they see a lack of match and they’re disappointed,” said Dr. Scott Fraser, assistant professor and director, undergraduate studies in psychology at USC. “Children are at a younger and younger age becoming aware of, or sensitized to, concern about adult standards of evaluating themselves. Part of it comes through exposure of media; TV and movies. Thirty, 40 years ago they were watching Disney cartoons, and other shows that were about homey issues. Now they’re seeing things like James Bond films.”
Dr. Kenneth Yasny, a nutrition counselor at the Santa Monica-based eating disorders clinic ESTEEM, said: “Take a look at commercials on TV and you’ll see the level of sophistication of them. Yet the age group of the focus of the commercial is very young. There is one where two little girls are talking about how their mother takes fiber tablets to stay thin.”
Yasny, who teaches parents and children about nutrition, added: “Most of the children I have seen have some sort of distorted image, whether it’s body or mind power; they say, ‘I’m so stupid.’ They are obviously able to continue an intellectual conversation, yet they’re feeling so stupid, so inadequate. It’s part and parcel of same problem. It’s being bred like rabbits in our kids, and we as adults are propagating it.”
Strange Regimens
Children who have gone on diets to lose weight can concoct strange regimens. One child’s conception of a diet may be to skip dinner two nights in a row, or to cut back on candy and junk food; still others may just talk about dieting without actually doing it.
The ones who said they were on structured diets tended to be heavy, and said that their parents or doctors had mandated the weight loss. Still, all of those who had attempted diets knew the frustrations of sticking to it, not being able to resist sweets or the lure of fast food.
“When I try to lose weight,” one girl from Dixie Canyon said, “I eat Instant Breakfast every other day for breakfast and dinner. I’ll have an Instant Breakfast and potato chips without salt and I’m not hungry anymore. Now I’m seeing results.”
‘I Get Depressed’
Said another: “When I diet I get depressed and I can’t exercise, so I gain more.”
“When I diet I drink a big glass of water whenever I’m hungry. I read that in a magazine once,” said an 11-year-old sixth-grader.
Another sixth-grader said that when she does diet, “It doesn’t last long. I try to stay away from junk food, but then my friends and I will go down to the 7-Eleven and eat a lot.”
At Horace Mann Elementary School in Beverly Hills the fourth-grade boys, too, have a tough time keeping on a strict program. “I tried to go on a diet for maybe three days,” said one boy who was not overweight. “But you keep on seeing food and it’s hard.” Why did he want to lose weight? “I wanted to get skinnier. I’ve been eating so much sugar for the past few days,” he said, exasperated at the thought.
Said his classmate, an average-size boy, “If I get up to 60 pounds in a month, then I’ll go on a diet.”
Another boy, who was slightly chunky, said that when he diets he gives his extra money to his mother, keeping only what he needs for lunch, so he won’t be tempted to buy food that’s bad for him.
Mom Said to Diet
About one-third of the fourth-graders at Manhattan Place Elementary School said they diet. Explained one girl, “My mother told me to go on a diet, she said my belly was too fat.” Did she like the way she looks? “My face, not my body. It’s too big. My stomach sticks out.”
Another girl said she went on a diet last month and “cut down on French fries on hamburgers and ate more vegetables and fruit.”
“Once I went on a diet,” a thin girl said, “and I didn’t eat for two nights, but then I ate a lot in the morning. I lost five pounds.” Did she think she was skinny now? “Yeah.”
A couple of the girls at McKinley Elementary said they ate when they were depressed, filling up on brownies, cookies and candy, or “Anything I can find in the refrigerator.”
Another girl said she asks her mother to hide the ice cream so she won’t eat it.
And as the class was clearing out of the room, one girl said timidly, “I want to go on a diet ‘cause I’m fat, but my Mom doesn’t let me.”
One boy at Horace Mann Elementary said, “Girls in my Hebrew school are always going on a diet. They think the boys won’t like them (if they’re fat).” Does he mind if a girl is a bit overweight? “If she’s a little, it’s OK. If she’s really fat, then no.”
Danger in Dieting
Pediatrician Dr. Matt Young, who has a private practice in Encino, said he sees adolescents, not children dieting, but cautions that children’s diets “can be good, or they can be negative. Of the kids I see, they probably eat better than kids did 10 years ago. I think they know that junk food is generally not healthy. But dieting is not the most important thing in life. Getting exercise and eating healthy food is important. When they put themselves on diets, it can be dangerous because you’re not just dealing with an adult who isn’t growing anymore. With a very stringent diet, you could have growth retardation that could not be reversed.”
Television, movies and magazines may have a strong influence over children’s behavior, but they are not the only influences. At each of the four schools, almost all of the children said they had at least one parent or a sibling living with them who is or had been on a diet.
They see their parents on never-ending weight-loss programs, observe weight fluctuations and see them sneaking food and binging. One fourth-grader said, “My mom always wants to go on a diet, and she buys ice cream for me, but then by accident she eats it, or when I go to bed she eats it.”
Another girl said that when her mother tips the scale at 105 pounds, two more pounds than her desired weight, “she’ll say, ‘I’ve got to lose weight.’ She says she’s too fat.”
‘Yucky’ Diet Food
Others mentioned that their parents often skip meals when dieting, throw out every cookie and piece of candy in the house and prepare “yucky” diet food like green beans, salad or plain boiled chicken.
“Children are being socialized into a weightist culture,” Mellin said. “There is a general intolerance toward any deviation (in appearance.) This calls into play the important opportunity for parents to realize what messages are sifting down to their children. They need to learn how to teach their kids acceptance of the body size, and how to eat to be healthy, not to starve and binge. Parents often do not have the time available to talk to their kids about body size. And schools have an opportunity to recognize this body image disparity. They can teach the kids how to manage their weight, just like people learn to manage their checkbooks.”
Mellin believes that as children are shuttled from piano lessons to football practice, there is enormous pressure put on them to succeed. Often, she said, the stress is handled with food.
Whether this preoccupation with dieting and self-image will lead to serious eating disorders such as anorexia nervosa (an extreme fear of gaining weight that may lead to self-starvation) or bulimia (ingestion of large amounts of food followed by self-induced vomiting or laxatives) is an issue for debate. Mellin found that 9% of the 9- and 10-year-olds in her study reported some type of purge behavior toward food. Binge-eating increased steadily with age, with all of the 18-year-olds surveyed saying they currently engage in binge-eating.
But Dr. Michael Strober, director of the Adolescent Eating Disorders Program at UCLA’s Neuropsychiatric Institute, said, “I think that there is a danger of over-interpreting the ominous significance of (diet-consciousness). I tend to doubt very much that we’re going to see a correspondence in eating disorders, because there are certain necessary psychological events, physical events, that seem to underwrite the development of eating disorders. I think the fact that there is an increased expressed desire to diet doesn’t necessarily imply any imminent increase in eating disorders.”
Mimicry of Values
Strober added, “There is a closer merging of feelings about self and body shape that crystallizes in adolescence, and it is not as defined in younger children. Younger children may express a desire to be thin, but I think that what that really reflects is mimicry of certain social and cultural values. It’s a much more complex psychological phenomenon among older kids. Which is why, not surprisingly, with adolescence you get a sudden surge in eating disorders. We know that the incidence (of childhood eating disorders) is 1% to 3%. The commonplace concerns kids have about dieting, weight and bodily appearance, and the low rate of disorders, would indicate that most children and young adolescents who exhibit these concerns, will remain relatively free of clinical symptoms of eating disorders.”
Not everyone who drinks becomes an alcoholic, and not everyone who diets becomes anorexic. Strober’s profile of the pre-adolescent girl prone to eating disorders is one who is, “much more inhibited and socially isolated. There is a tendency toward greater obsessiveness and emotional constriction.” He added that the girls tend to have more feeding difficulties early in life, and are usually on the thin side. Girls who develop anorexia nervosa as adolescents or young adults tend to be overweight. “Exactly what happens to these girls over time,” he said, “is not really known because so few girls develop eating disorders as pre-adolescents. But the girls that we’ve treated, the majority have done very well.”
Dr. Murray Zucker, founder and medical director of the Eating Disorders Program of Northridge Hospital, has seen patients as young as 10 and 11 in his clinic. While he agrees with the profile of the anorexia and bulimia-prone woman, he is concerned about the ramifications of dieting in young girls. “Even if they are mimicking what they see, it is still something to be concerned about. The entire preoccupation with weight and looks is worrisome in the general population. A vast number of people have a distortion of how they perceive themselves, and that has a lot of implications.
“If pre-pubertal girls are on diets,” he added, “it doesn’t mean they have anorexia. Does it mean it will lead to it? If you’re going through school and you hear ‘I’m on a diet, you’re on a diet,’ that early on, then you’re going to be causing a lot more stress on these anorexia-prone people.”
Mellin would like to see children judge themselves as well as be judged on something other than weight and appearance; the amount of energy spent worrying about diets “could be put to more productive use. We’ve know for years that women have body-image distortion, and the disparity (between how they look and how they see themselves) is something we’ve grown accustomed to. When that’s found in children, that’s a problem.”
There may be hope yet; one 9-year-old boy, when asked his attitudes toward overweight girls, said, “I don’t bother a girl if she’s overweight. She might be nice.”
