When Hollywood loses weight, teens suffer
May 17, 2010
Trish Crawford
LIVING REPORTER
When Shayla Gutterman looked for role models, she found them in Hollywood.
You may think Nicole Richie and Tara Reid are too thin and don’t portray healthy role models, but Gutterman — like a lot of teenagers — assumed that being famous meant they were fine.
So the Thornhill teenager cut out all fat in her diet in order to look like them — and became anorexic.
As the stars cleanse, fast, drink cabbage soup, go vegetarian, pop pills and survive on liquids, star-struck teenagers follow suit.
The latest rumours have Hollywood stars like Jennifer Aniston and Lady Gaga following the baby-food diet, subsisting on puréed pears and mashed bananas to lose weight. This disconnect between idealized image and real life is hurting young women, experts say, who resort to extremes to meet unrealistic goals.
“I can see now that they are seriously underweight,” says Gutterman, now 21, healthy and in university, who blames media obsession with weight for teenagers’ concerns.
She points singer Jessica Simpson, who has been lambasted for her weight when, Gutterman says, “I think she is a healthy person. But the criticism is brutal.”
“We have a distorted image of what normal is,” says Anne Elliott, program manager of Sheena’s Place, a resource centre in Toronto for people with eating disorders and their families.
“Our message here is that diets are dangerous,” she says. “Diets can get people on a treadmill their whole life of obsessing about losing weight, feeling bad, falling off.”
Young women are particularly vulnerable to the message that something is wrong with them and they need to “transform their lives,” says Elliott, who promotes three healthy meals and two snacks per day.
“Celebrities are sometimes perceived as role models that the kids follow,” says Patricia, 27, a volunteer at Sheena’s Place.
Although she wasn’t a celebrity-follower when she developed anorexia as a teen — she wanted to eat only “healthy” food, and the selection became increasingly narrow— Patricia says eating disorders are about young women “trying to feel better about themselves.”
The more popular and successful a star is, the greater her impact on impressionable young women, says Amelia Perri, 36, a psychotherapist in Vaughan who counsels those with eating disorders.
“You can google anything, open any magazine” to see stories about weight-loss tricks, says Perri, who battled anorexia in her 20s. She is now against dieting and advocates healthy eating.
“If Jennifer Aniston has to do this, what is the message? If she’s eating baby food, I might as well kill myself.”
tcrawford@thestar.ca
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