Thin is in

I saw this photo recently and just wanted to throw up. (Ironic, huh?)

My girls have a unique balance of confidence and insecurity. I’m incredibly proud of both of them and of how often they manage to stand firm on their convictions, whether their peers agree or not. But other times, they are just as sucked in as everyone else. Thin sucks them in.

My girls have known what it’s like to not have enough food.

We’ve been lucky. Neither of the girls has food-hoarding issues that so often come from years of living without. But it took quite a while for either of them to realize that as long as they ate dinner, they could pretty much eat whatever they wanted, whenever they wanted.

We keep well-stocked with reasonably healthy snacks and foods, plus the occasional bag of chips or cookies. Given the opportunity, of course, they would eat through a bag of chips like a pack of wild dogs…but in the absence, they don’t complain, they just crank open a can of tuna.

So when Masha started eating half-portions of things, and Lena started complaining “I’m fat,” I was a little surprised. More than a little. And despite doctors’ assertions that they are both a perfectly healthy weight, both girls now battle with the insecurity that photos like this one shove in their faces.

The desire for “thin” has endured for too long. I don’t think I’ve spoken to one person that thinks this is OK…so why the canyon between what we know to be right and what the media feeds us?

Are we that susceptible to the very marketers that prey on our insecurities? Seems that the fashion and the diet industries both profit, while our girls (and guys too) suffer and sometimes even die. How is that OK?

I have no illusion that I and the 12 readers of this blog can stomp into the Office of the Minister of High Fashion Marketing and say “stop this” and they will stop. Greater writers on much greater platforms than this have spoken out against this. News outlets around the world have done pieces. Everyone is informed.

Yet we still buy skinny jeans for our kids, Mattel still manufactures a Barbie with anatomically impossible proportions, Gap still stands up mannequins that couldn’t stand up by themselves if they were live people.

Do you think the mother and her baby starving in Somalia think this is fashionable?