Can Size Zero Impact Mental Health?

We tape notes to the refrigerator. We religiously check our scales. We go through our closets and drag out items that haven't fit us in years. We cry. We hate the mirror. We struggle to make our bodies fit into the image we hold in our mind's eye. We are obsessed.

I know this illness. I still have the pair of shorts I would hang on my wall as motivation to lose a few pants sizes. The diet pills, the crash diets, the avoidance of scales and mirrors. These are the tools that I used. I forgot a couple of things though, like the health of my body and my mental health. These tools took over my life in the most bizarre of ways.

The coveted size zero has such an impact on our mental health that the United States Department of Health and Human Services has stated that 90% of the women with eating disorders are between the ages of 12 and 25. That means that we have placed such a focus on sizes that even preteens are creating their own form of a disease in order to fit the "mold".

It starts with an idea that weight needs to be lost. Extra care and effort are taken during exercise and eating. The beginning of such a focus causes us to lose dramatic amounts of weight. We don't even acknowledge that this is normal for any diet and that sooner or later even on the same diet, our weight loss will plateau or even stop as fat is lost and heavier weighing muscle is gained. We are like cocaine addicts searching for that first high in the pursuit of those negative numbers in our minds.

The result is usually an eating disorder such as anorexia nervosa, bulimia or binge-eating. These are the eating disorders that ultimately may occur as a result of the pursuit of size zero. Really though, these are just the icing on the cake. Once that icing is removed, there are normally other mental health issues to be faced, such as depression, low self esteem and other disorders that led up to the eating disorder.

Not only do other issues lead up to the eating disorder, but the eating disorder creates issues of its own as the victim becomes more and more out of control. The reality is that these mental health problems are all about control and it ends up extending to every phase of our lives. We set unrealistic expectations for ourselves, like being 5'10" and thinking that we need to fit in a size zero. Pretty soon we become obsessed with tedious tasks. Personally, at one point during the climax of my eating disorder, I even had my closets and dresser organized not just by styles, but by color and size as well.

My life became a tape that replayed in my head as I avoided all foods but lettuce and then forced myself to choke that down. I walked in unsafe areas to burn calories rather than taking a safer mode of transportation. I did every exercise I could think of before bed, then repeated them all over again until I was so exhausted I had to crawl to bed.

Yes, I can say without a doubt that size zero can have a heavy impact on your mental health. It can in fact destroy your self image completely if you let it. Sometimes in our pursuit of weight loss we end up losing more of ourselves than just our weight. We may end up looking like models, but the inside of us is just a chaotic mess of anxiety. For me, size zero just isn't worth it.

Reference: http://mentalhealth.samhsa.gov/publications/allpubs/ken98-0047/default.asp