Opinion: Body dissatisfaction reached children

As a nutritionist, I realize that most patients who come to me with the desire to lose weight say that health and body dissatisfaction are the main motivators for weight loss, as if health and body satisfaction were separate and independent issues. .

For most of these patients, health means not having disease, not feeling pain and observing a blood test with all rates within the reference values. That is, health is still perceived as a state subject to biomedical care.

I do not intend to criticize this thought, but rather to broaden the perception of the plurality of aspects that can compose what we call health and the possibilities of possible care for oneself and one’s own body.

Body image is a psychological construction about one’s own body, whose life experiences can interfere with a positive or negative perception of what one sees in the mirror. Physical changes that occur in adolescence, due to puberty, can be preponderant in the formation of a negative body image, causing distress, anguish and suffering.

A study carried out by Triches and Giugliani (2007) with 844 adolescents between 11 and 17 years old in southern Brazil observed the presence of body dissatisfaction in 70.9% of the participating adolescents, and that girls with an adequate BMI (body mass index) wanted to have smaller silhouettes. Idealizing a body image that differs from the real one can lead young people to extreme attitudes such as adherence to restrictive diets, the development of eating disorders and depression.

My work experience allows me to hear and understand women who suffer from body dissatisfaction. Women who, regardless of nutritional diagnosis (adequate weight, overweight or obesity), have the same goal: to see the number on the scale decrease.

Among women with adequate weight, in addition to the number on the scale, dissatisfaction and reluctance to accept their own body type are common, together with the hope that only with food it is possible to fit into a mold and standard of beauty that has been extended to the world. children’s imagination.

It has been increasingly common to see children around the age of 10 with the proper weight, worried about weight gain and depriving themselves at parties, for example, to keep from gaining weight.

I believe that at this point of reading it is already possible to perceive that health and body dissatisfaction are not dissociated, but united. As I mentioned earlier, I intend to expand the plurality of what makes up health beyond the absence of disease, pain and changes in blood tests. The image about oneself and what influences the construction of this image, such as the family context, are part of what health is.