levision and we’ve watched their weights drop until their bones show through. Some of them include Jennifer Aniston and Courtney Cox Arquette on “Friends”, “Ally Mcbeal's” Calista Flockhart, and Pamela Lee Anderson on “Baywatch”. Pamela is 5’7” and weighs 120 pounds; she is supposed to be the voluptuous ideal, yet she is 11% below ideal body weight. In contrast, a generation ago Marilyn Monroe set the beauty standard at 5’5”, weighing 135 pounds. In today’s standards she would be considered fat. The super thin actresses that we all see on television and movies are role models to their fans; and in their quest to be like their idols, some fans may end up with serious even life threatening eating disorders.On the other hand the press is helping to educate and inform the public about the seriousness of these disorders with attention to the eating disorder related deaths of public figures as well as the admission of other well known people such as Princess Diana, actresses Ally Sheedy, Tracy Gold and Jane Fonda that they have struggled with anorexia and bulimia. Unfortunately the media and public continue to idolize the ultra thin body images.I have dealt with an eating disorder myself and I can honestly say that media played a big part in my eating disorder. When I was a child I was overweight and the other children teased and made fun of me; those children most likely got their ideas about the ideal body shape and their attitudes about fat from the media and society. When I got older I read a lot of magazines, all of them showed toothpick thin models and included diet and exercise plans that promised to work like magic. I also saw on television and in movies that in order to be beautiful and lead a happy life I obviously needed to be skinny. I still feel very insecure about my body when I look at magazines or see the skinny actresses on television or in movies....
