Numerous people blame the media for the eating disorders, negative body image and unhealthy weight-management practices that afflict many girls and women, as well as a significant minority of men.
Teens, especially, strive to imitate the perfect bodies they see on television and in the movies.
Over the past few years, however, live-action television shows aimed at adolescents have responded by airing special episodes that deal with teen issues such as self-esteem, addiction, violence, peer pressure, the dangers of smoking, drinking and driving and more.
In a special episode of “Brand Spanking New Doug,” titled “Doug’s Chubby Buddy” (7:30 a.m. Saturday on WLS-Ch.7), the sticklike cartoon character Patti Mayonnaise becomes convinced she is fat. It all begins when 13-year-old Patti and her girlfriends were watching the popular “Teenheart Street” and its beautiful and thin star, Briar Langolier. During a commercial for Waist-Away, a diet kit designed to fight body fat, Patti grows paranoid when Lardy, a hunk of talking fat cells, explains that he takes over your body when you turn 13.
Patti buys the Waist-Away kit and becomes compulsive about dieting and exercise. There are no parents to intercede, and her girlfriends are as obsessed as she is about losing weight. Concerned, Doug asks Patti’s track coach if he thinks her diet is getting carried away. He responds: “All athletes diet, and if every athlete gets carried away, we’d have more trophies.”
According to Dr. Margo Maine, director of eating disorders at the Institute of Living in Hartford, Conn., girls don’t actively diet until they are 12 or 13 years old, but many think about it earlier. “Occasionally you will see 8- or 9-year-old kids who are already restricting their intake and worrying about what they eat,” says Maine. “The phenomenon does occur before adolescence.”
People with eating disorders usually say they have never felt good about their bodies and were always watching their weight and thinking about it. “That often occurs when, in a family, there are other people who do not have healthy attitudes toward their own bodies,” Maine says.
It’s difficult to formulate that scenario in a 30-minute cartoon, so Patti’s eating disorder begins instantly and ends with a fairy-tale recovery. Despite these impracticalities, kids will definitely get the point that Patti’s compulsive behavior, such as consuming a nutritional spray for lunch, is unhealthy. When Patti skips breakfast and lunch the day of a big track meet because she thought she would run faster on an empty stomach, she collapses.
Miss Kristal, Patti’s teacher, makes her understand how she is jeopardizing her health: “When you don’t eat, your body still needs proteins, so it breaks down muscle tissue and organs and starts to eat itself. You lose strength, not gain it.”
Maine says most eating disorders begin with early warning signs. A youngster might get on a scale regularly, talk a lot about appearance and weight, exercise alone for long periods of time, eat when sad or upset, refuse food because it has fat in it, count calories, talk about food frequently, not like to eat with friends or family, try to be perfect in everything and rarely answer back or appear angry.
Maine describes more serious signs relating to an eating disorder in adolescence as a child losing weight (or losing it, then gaining), beginning to binge, becoming secretive about food intake (stashing food in his or her room), cooking for other people or collecting recipes but not eating the food themselves, getting upset when unable to exercise, talking about wanting to lose weight, and appearing moody, isolated, irritated or unpredictable.
“Some of these symptoms are normal behaviors,” says Maine. “But if there is a developmental crisis that comes along, such as a friendship breaking up, a parent’s divorce, a death or a move, these symptoms will trigger it to become more of an eating disorder.”
Maine applauds the episode, noting that professionals working in eating disorders work hard to translate what they know into media and messages that kids can understand. “I think the notion of exploring an eating disorder through a cartoon makes tremendous sense,” says Maine. “Twenty-five-year-olds go to lectures; 8-year-olds or 12-year-olds don’t. They learn via play, stories, cartoons or movies.”
At the conclusion of “Doug’s Chubby Buddy,” Patti Mayonnaise will provide viewers with a telephone number (1-800-729-6686) where free information about eating disorders is available.
