ANN ARBOR—DOES THIS MAKE ME LOOK FAT?—About one out of five young college women A BIG SECRET—”No one around me ever talked about it,” says Michelle Bolek, a first-year student at the U-M School of Public Health who founded Students Promoting Eating Disorder Education, Awareness, and Knowledge—S.P.E.A.K. As a high school basketball player, Bolek started exercising and watching what she ate to get in shape for the season. She felt good about what she was doing. It was something really positive. But soon she became obsessed with losing weight. Grades, family, health, and friends all suffered. One night, after exercising for hours, she passed out. Soon after, she got help. Now she and other young women are trying to help each other reclaim control over their own bodies. Read more in the Michigan Daily’s Web archive for Jan. 27, through http://www.pub.umich.edu/daily/1999/jan/01-27-99/news/news3.html

MEDIA FUEL DRIVE TO BE THIN—About 15 percent of the 232 female undergraduates surveyed by U-M researcher Kristin Harrison met criteria for disordered eating—signs of anorexia or bulimia, body dissatisfaction, a drive for thinness, perfectionism, and a sense of personal ineffectiveness. Harrison, an assistant professor of communication studies, also found that women who frequently read fitness magazines showed greater signs of disordered eating than women who didn’t. Reading fashion magazines, in particular, was significantly related to a woman’s drive for thinness and her dissatisfaction with her body. In a related study, Harrison found that young women who were attracted to “thin” characters in TV shows like “Melrose Place” and “Beverly Hills 90210” were more likely than those who were attracted to average-size or heavy celebrities to show signs of disordered eating. For more information, contact Bernie DeGroat at (734) 647-1847 or e-mail [email protected]

HIGH COSTS OF FEMALE PREOCCUPATION WITH BODY IMAGE—How do I look? Even if the answer is “Great,” just asking the question can have a harmful effect on a woman’s emotional health and mental performance, according to U-M psychologist Barbara Fredrickson. In studies of more than 350 young men and women, Fredrickson and colleagues show that women who are self-conscious about how they look score worse on advanced math tests than women and men who aren’t preoccupied with their appearance. This tendency to view your body from the outside in—seeing your physical attractiveness, sex appeal, measurements, and weight as more central to your physical identity than your health, strength, energy level, coordination, or fitness— HOW THE PROTESTANT ETHIC HARMS OVERWEIGHT WOMEN—Maybe the Protestant ethic made this country what it is today. But according to a new U-M study, it also makes overweight women feel bad about themselves. The study, forthcoming in the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, provides experimental evidence that just listening to messages supporting hard work and self-discipline makes women who feel fat also feel anxious and depressed. It has no effect on women who think their weight is normal. The study’s implication: that listening to conservative messages may be bad for the self-esteem of one out of every three adult women in America, the proportion estimated to be overweight. Still, it’s not whether you are overweight, but whether you feel overweight, that puts you at risk of the blues after listening to conservative rhetoric.

Journal of Personality and Social Psychology