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Eating Disorders - a Peep at Past
Body Image Programming
    

Posted October 20, 2009
By Kathleen Fuller, Ph.D.
Have you ever wondered about how we got to be Fast Food Mamas who always want to diet?
  • Thought I’d pull a few over-the-top retro ads to share.  Look for the connection to eating disorders and the media’s part in programming women’s body image. Old advertisements are always quirky, but ads from the past can make you laugh. That is, until you realize how some things really haven’t changed at all. The truth is things change when you become more aware and apply what you’ve learned to the experiences you presently choose in your life.
  • 1924 Beeman’s Chewing Gum vintage advertisement. Illustrated with photo of  Dr. Beeman. Marketed for relief of insomnia. Scissors to remove gum-in-hair came extra.  Later you’ll see chewing gum promoted for dieting.

How Did We Get Here?

  • I want to shine a light on how the diet paradigm evolved with the fast foods and sugar .
  •  1957 Life Savers Pep O Mint Candy vintage advertisement. Text reads, “Shirley Simpkins lost her sleek appeal. She never stops eating from meal to meal. Slim Sally Hayes stays light on her feet, she makes Life Savers her ‘Between Meal treat.” Picture shows frumpy Shirley Simpkins eating cookies while two boys look on frowning and a sleek and chic Sally Hayes eating Life Savers with two boys smiling and waving at her. Fifty years later, some things never change. (Notice the message that the girl’s names convey subconsciously Simpkins or simpleton implied. 
  • Sally Hayes gets the boys hays and waves.) This was the focus on baby boomer teens having money for the 1st time.  Parents who lived through the Great Depression wanted to give their children the good life.
  • 1967 Clark’s Diet Chewing Gum vintage advertisement. Because gum is soooo fattening.  This is a subconscious connection that links gum to be the diet cure for the for fatty foods.
  • What I’d like you to do before we go further is to take yourself back in time using your imagination and recall some of your favorite childhood food or fashion ads.  Either T.V. or print ads from magazines you looked at when growing up.  If you are taking notes jot down what you remember..   (pause)  Take a few minutes to do that.
I remember this one, KOOL AID, KOOL AID, Tastes Great, KOOL AID, KOOL AID, Can’t Wait.    And thinking about it, this is promoting aid, a-i-d , which  reminds me of First Aid.  The ‘aid ‘must  be adding sugar and artificial coloring to water to make it KOOL.  We all know how alluring the sweet taste of sugar is.  And of course sugar isn’t so wonderful when it becomes part of a Food Addiction.  I remember taking the commercial suggestions further in my earlier years because I had and have a food addiction, I would eat sugar by the spoonful. The following ad appeared promoting pure sugar by the teaspoon for dieting.  This ad was in Seventeen’s 1966 magazine when Twiggy was becoming popular.  I modeled in that issue and became anorexic trying to be thin enough like the 89 pound Twiggy. I did eat sugar by the spoonful and eat almost nothing else.
  • Or remember in the 1980’s   Disney’s Mary Poppin’s song, “A spoonful of sugar makes the medicine go down, makes the medicine go down.”

Interesting the fast food clip art I used on line to for this presentation was massive.  Under the category of healthy food there were zero clip art.  The one I found was a beautiful in shape woman eating a salad. (Salad alone isn’t the best healthy food. And the salad needs to be dark green leaves with lots of other veggies.) So we are a culture shaped by media advertising.  When TV came on the scene, TV ads  started  programming dieting for the baby boomers with ads such as the Clark’s Diet Chewing Gum.

  • Another fact today is by the time a girl starts high school she’ll have watched 350,000 television & print ads.  Over 50% of these ads stress being thin and beautiful.  What is even more astounding is many of the super models’ pictures are “fixed” to take out their imperfections.  Remember “Pretty Woman” Julia’s body wasn’t good enough so she had a body double.
  • Beauty & fashion have changed many times over the past 200 years.  (The “Gibson Girls” of 1895 were tall athletic, self confident women and they redefined the female ideal.   38 inch bust, 27 inch waist, 45 inch hips.) 

It’s shocking to learn the lengths women have gone through in order to achieve a presumed “Perfect Beauty”. There is nothing perfect in this real world except who you are and how you are made differently than anyone else on this Earth?
Barefoot Body Paradise Everyday,
Dr. Kathleen Fuller, Ph.D.
#1 Amazon Bestseller
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Leading Eating Disorder Expert
The Surgeon of The Subconscious TM
Not Your Mother's Diet Dr. Fuller, a leading eating disorder expert reports on little-known tips too many tragically ignore in her breakthrough book
Not Your Mother’s Diet
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