Ep. 32 Internet Use and Weight Dissatisfaction in Teens
Nov 29, 2023
Dr Jenny Gourgari
Imagine the mental weight lifted from the shoulders of our adolescent girls once they realize that they are more than the images they see on the internet.
I present a study conducted in Australia, which sheds light on how constant exposure to the internet and social media fuels teenagers' discontent with their body weight and amplifies their quest for perceived thinness. These platforms promote unrealistic beauty standards and can increase body weight dissatisfaction, primarily due to the comparisons teenagers make between their own lives and the ones they see online.
Tune in to learn more about this study and what you can do to help avoid this.
Dr Gourgari is a pediatric endocrinologist, certified in obesity medicine expert and weight loss coach for teens with more than 15 years of experience. She helps teens build healthy habits that last, so they can feel happier, be more confident and love their body again .
Imagine the mental weight lifted from the shoulders of our adolescent girls once they realize that they are more than the images they see on the internet.
I present a study conducted in Australia, which sheds light on how constant exposure to the internet and social media fuels teenagers' discontent with their body weight and amplifies their quest for perceived thinness. These platforms promote unrealistic beauty standards and can increase body weight dissatisfaction, primarily due to the comparisons teenagers make between their own lives and the ones they see online.
Tune in to learn more about this study and what you can do to help avoid this.
Dr Gourgari is a pediatric endocrinologist, certified in obesity medicine expert and weight loss coach for teens with more than 15 years of experience. She helps teens build healthy habits that last, so they can feel happier, be more confident and love their body again .
This is the Lifestyle in Weight Loss for Teens podcast. If you are a mom and want to help your child who is struggling to lose weight, you are in the right place. If you are looking for healthy lifestyle tips, Dr Gorgary is here to help you understand the science around safe weight loss in teens and children, Because what works for adult weight loss is not always the best for children. This podcast is for educational purposes only. Dr Gorgary does not provide medical, psychological or nutrition therapy advice. You should not use this information to diagnose or treat any health problems without consulting your own medical practitioner and now your host, Dr Jenny Gorgary.
Speaker 2:
Hello, welcome to another episode of the Lifestyle in Weight Loss for Teens. This is Dr Jenny Gorgary, and in today's episode, I will dive into a topic in regards to spending time on social media and the internet, and what is this effect on adolescent girls' weight satisfaction and drive for thinness. I have talked a lot about the recommendations for social media use, which by American Academy of Pediatrics and American Obstetrics Society is less than two hours per day, and part of this is exposure to social media has a negative emotional effect and also can have a negative effect on how teenagers feel about their body. Now, why does this happen? This happens because when you go on Facebook, when you go on Instagram, when you go on the internet, and you see all these people having these great photos, having these great lives, you kind of inevitably compare that to your own life and you may feel you're not as beautiful, you don't have as beautiful body, you're not as lucky, you're not as happy, you're not as thin, or you don't have long hair, you don't have blue eyes, and all these comparisons that go on that, as a result, can have a negative effect on your self-esteem, can have a negative effect on your mood and how you feel and can even lead to this unhealthy behavior in regards to your eating. So形에서 우리 Risk으로. This is a very big topic and I'm just going to present one small part of that social media effect and, in particular, this was a study that was done a few years ago, but I think it is still relevant. It was published in 2010. The actual title of this manuscript is the Internet and Adolescent Girls' Weight Satisfaction and Drive for Thinness.
Speaker 2:
This was a very interesting study. It was done in Australia. The leading author is Marie Katigeeman, and what they did is they asked teenager girls between the ages of 13 to 18 years of age. They asked them how long and how much time they spent on the internet, what kind of pages they view and all that. And back then, as I said, in 2010, I assume, facebook was just not as big as it is today, so maybe some of this effect, if anything, are underrepresented compared to what's going on in 2023.
Speaker 2:
So they asked them to say how much time they spent on the internet and, at the same time, they asked them to fill out questionnaires that assess their impression of what is their weight satisfaction. So, for example, they would tell them I think I have a good body. What is your scale? From a scale from one to five, how would you rate the sentence? Similar questions like that. So they would try to understand how satisfied they were with their weight. They would also ask them questionnaire to understand whether they wanted to be thinner. So, for example, they would ask them that I am preoccupied with a desire to be thinner and similar questions from a scale from one to six how do you feel about that?
Speaker 2:
They would also ask them questions about how they feel about comparing themselves to other people. For example, in social situations. I feel that I compare my body with how other bodies look like and similar to that. And also they would ask them questions that had to do with how much they feel that what is represented in the media is actually the ideal situation. So, for example, they would say that I would like my body to look like the bodies of the people that I see in the movies. So whatever they are seeing on the internet or on the movies or in the social media, they want that because they think this is the ideal situation. They feel this is the ideal image and then they want that.
Speaker 2:
So once they put all that data together, they wanted to see whether there is a relationship between the time they were spending on the Internet and also how they felt about their body weight and their body satisfaction and the ideals that they had. So they total was 156 Australian female high school students, so the average age was 14.9 years of age, and they found that the girls that spend more time on the Internet, they had more strong relationship with internalizing the thin ideal they see on social media. In other words, they were exposed more time on the social media. They felt that this is the ideal way to live your life and be like in this certain body and not in the body that. They had worse weight dissatisfaction, like they didn't like their own body. They had body image concerns and they also had more comparison. They had more the tendency to compare their lives with the lives that they were seeing on the Internet, on Facebook and on Google and all those things. Now they did not have all the details of like how much time they spent on each page and all that, but they did get a good sense of having more exposure on the Internet can give you more body weight dissatisfaction, can give you more drive to want to be thinner like the people you see on the Internet and those effects, the researchers felt that they were driven because they were comparing themselves to what they were seeing.
Speaker 2:
So if you see somebody on Facebook or on Instagram and you just admire them without comparing that to yourself, that may not necessarily be about problem, like that may not be an issue. But if you see someone who is very different than where you are and instead of admiring them for their uniqueness because we all come in different shapes, in different sizes and different colors and beauty is not in one size and one color and one length of hair or one color of eyes and all this like beauty is multi-dimensional and if you can accept that and see that, then this is great. But if you spend time on social media and you just compare yourself and you want to be what you see there and this is what happens very frequently with especially teenagers I mean, it happens with adults too, but teenagers are more susceptible to these influences than they can have all these negative effects on this body image issue. So one of the main reasons that I keep talking again and again about the limiting social media exposure or be more careful what you're, where you are spending your time and how are you using the information you see on social media in your daily life? How does that affect you? It's because I know that it can have all these negative effects.
Speaker 2:
So I know it is not easy to stop being on social media. You can, just it's not easy. Well, the fact that it's not easy doesn't mean it cannot happen. And also, when we say limit social media, we don't say don't ever go on Facebook, don't ever go on Instagram, and even a small decrease can have a positive effect. Like, for example, if you are now spending five hours and six hours, which I know I hear it all the time from the families that I work with that they spent a lot of time on social media. Even if you can cut back an hour, half a minute, 15 minutes, maybe the time that you are coming back from school, maybe the time before sleep, maybe the time in the afternoon, first of all, you can take back all that time and use it in a more productive way.
Speaker 2:
But slowly you can get in the habit to not be all the time influenced by that and try to limit this effect, because the more the exposure, you're more likely to not feel good about yourself, to not feel good about your body to keep comparing yourself with all these images you see there that are not necessarily true, and why do that to yourself? So consider having a conversation as a family around this topic. Evaluate what are your feelings when you see that. How do you compare yourself to the images you see, and then start to examine that relationship and see whether you can do something to improve that. That was all I had for you today. I hope this was helpful. Share this episode with a friend if you think it was helpful, and I'm going to be talking more about this in future episodes because I know it is a big topic. Take care of you all. I'll talk to you soon.
Speaker 1:
If you enjoyed listening to this podcast, I invite you to come check out the Lift program. It's Dr Gorgary's 12-week coaching program for teens and their moms, where we take all this information, we apply it to your daily life and we work together so your teenager learns how to create a healthy lifestyle so they can feel happier, more confident, less stressed and love their body again. Visit the website at lifestyleforteanscom and click on the work with me and the resources to learn more about this program and get free help to start this journey right away. Thanks for tuning in and we'll catch you in the next episode of lifestyle and weight loss for teens.