peer review/reflection of :

This week's reading of "Television, Disordered Eating, and Young Women in Fiji" by Anne Becker, tells us how a study back in 1998 was conducted through narrative data collected from 30 Fijian school girls on how much of an effect television has regarding body image and social identity. Before this study in 1995, the population of Fiji was just introduced to TV. At this time Fiji's native population didn't have any native Illnesses relating to eating disorders, moreover, cases of anorexia and bulimia were low to essentially nonexistent, but they did have two locally defined syndromes among the indigenous population, macake and go-ing thin . Before the introduction of TV, Fijian girls did not have any sort of motivation to change or view their bodies as mainly based on aesthetic admiration such as large calves (versus other cultures where admiration leads to body reshaping through exercise or diet).

Results of the study found that after TV was introduced to the native Fiji population, the subjects now experienced superficial feelings of wanting to "redefine local aesthetic ideals for bodily appearance and presentation" (Becker, 2004). The characteristics they now wanted to achieve were based on the lifestyles they viewed especially those they saw common in specific job/career fields. Some subjects in the study made comments like "Some of my friends, when they watch TV, when they see one actor, they want to look like that actor. They lose weight, and um some of them gain more weight. And that's how my friends are affected by watching the TV. (S-59)" (Becker, 2004) . Another subject said "No, I just want to be slim, because they [TV characters] are slim. Like it's influencing me so much that I have to be slim. I have to be fast enough so to run around when in time of help (S-45)" this to me gave a sense of urgency to reshape their body and lead me to think at this point if introducing Television to the population at this time ultimately did more harm than good for the youth?

Being that various forms of media, in this case, TV, are used frequently by impressionable youth all over the world this could lead to feeding and eating disorders. A respondent who confessed to "vomiting to lose weight described her observations on the effects of television on Fijian body image" and how American TV has made them feel as though the foods they were raised on caused them to be fat" and now they "feel that it is bad to have this huge body. [They] have to have those thin, slim bodies (S-64)" (Becker, 2004). The study seemed to find another pressure within the culture of parents. It seems like a lot of subjects want to lose weight or gain in order to do more work for their parents. A youth mentioned "My family] usually tell me to lose weight so sometimes when I'm not interested in doing some work, that's the time when they comment some more, some more words for me and told me that "we know you're gaining weight. It's better for you to lose weight, cause it's better for you to lose weight when you're doing some work at home it's easier for you then just gaining weight and moving slowly and not doing some work fast" [ . . . ] (S-44)" (Becker, 2004). According to the DSM-5 reading this week eating disorders such as Anorexia Nervous cause an intense fear of "gaining weight or of becoming fat, or persistent behavior that interferes with weight gain" and symptoms include food avoidance. It also has restrictive behavior such as purging and weight loss accomplished through dieting, fasting, and excessive exercise which has occurred among the subjects in this study.