From body image to body dysmorphia
The way we look to ourselves and the outside world is for an important part driven by media.
If we go back in time, we mostly call certain looks to a decade. The fifties brought the “Rock and roll” and Elvis retro-style hair. When I think “sixties” I see long hair, hippies, free love, a lot of flowers and a distinct music. Its was followed by “ Punk “. People follow a certain code in fashion, hairstyle, music etc.
As long as it comes to fashion or hairstyles, most people can adapt to these unwritten rules, mostly the younger people are very eager to be accepted, you’re “in” or “out”, in the sixties you where either “hip” or not, now the magic word is “cool”. What if this typation involves our body-image?
In the mid-sixties the most admired look changed from Hollywood icon Marilyn Monroe to a British fashion model called “Twiggy”. The most wanted body type changed from a fully curved voluptuous blond model to a boyish thin girl.
Whether you're thin, fat, small, dark, blond, redhead, you wanna be something else," said the world's first boldface supermodel. "I wanted a fairy godmother to make me look like Marilyn Monroe. I had no boobs, no hips, and I wanted it desperately."
Since then the fashion markets unnatural cq unhealthy thin models. To achieve this look , mostly very young, girls develop an unnatural eating behaviour from diet pills to bulimia and anorexia. The first signs of body dysmorphia embodied in eating disorders.
We've been speaking barely 10 minutes when Sarah Bridges shifts her enormous upper body in the doll's-house dimensions of her chair and takes in a young man, kit bag in hand, framed in the doorway of the Dartford pub she runs with her husband, Bill.
In the last 20 years, the number of overweight children and adolescents has tripled. Adults have fared just as poorly. Currently more than two thirds - almost 70% - of Americans are considered overweight or obese.
There appears to be no end in sight for the American cycle of eating itself to death. The economy hasn’t gotten much better, and the medical community consistently points out a lack of messaging and programming to stop the alarming increase in American obesity.
Vladimir Lenin, King Tut and the McDonald's Happy Meal: What do they all have in common? A shocking resistance to Mother Nature's cycle of decomposition and biodegradability, apparently.
It may not be the fountain of youth, but researchers at York University have discovered that regular exercise can effectively turn back the clock for aging skeletal muscle.
Have you ever noticed that people have thinner arms and legs as they get older? As we age it becomes harder to keep our muscles healthy. They get smaller, which decreases strength and increases the likelihood of falls and fractures. New research is showing how this happens — and what to do about it.
BY RONNY TOBER 2006
I wrote this article in 2006 for a great bodybuilding magazine. Times changed and a year after this article was posted Organon Greece produced its last vials. Does that mean they disappeared from the market? The real ones did, but the counterfeits are still readily available (see picture). I’ll post more from my old articles and will update them as soon as they change appearance.
In the nineties Jin Lei a brilliant Chinese pharmaceutical student, who graduated from Beijing University in 1985, studied in the USA. In his free time he worked hard as a research scientist at Genentech, an American biotech company and one of the world’s leading producers of human growth hormones. His special interest where antibodies that bind to human growth hormones.