It's Not Just a Young Person Thing

So my last post was about body image in men. Recently, I was asked how Self-ValYOU can apply to adults and older people. Well, EVERYONE has a body, and everyone has thoughts about it. Just because you are older doesn't mean you don't have insecurities, and older people use social media and are exposed to the same visual images that are out there. I found a great article on just this subject in the Journal of Magazine and New Media Research. In it they said that research shows that the more comparisons older people made of themselves to how they saw older adults portrayed in social media, the more dissatisfaction people felt about their own body (Gunter & Wykes, 2005).

For older individuals who are frequent media consumers, these images may form the basis for many conceptions of the ideal body image. Gunter and Wykes (2005) state that “exposure to the media-portrayed thin ideal is related to eating pathology and suggests that women may directly model disordered eating behavior presented in the media” (p. 161).

https://aejmcmagazine.arizona.edu/Journal/Fall2008/RobinsonCallister.pdf