There has been quite a bit of talk about regulating the fashion runways over the past two years, after a young Brazilian model died of causes directly tied to her anorexia. In other words, she starved herself to death due to pressures she probably partially felt from the field she was in, modeling, and also most likely societal pressures that are put on women to have very little body fat, here in the US and abroad.



Eating disorders have gained an all time high over the past 4 decades, and it's not likely to get any better as long as the industries that typically promote extreme skinniness such as modeling, acting, and also any type of career where your body is your life line. France has taken steps to actually enforce these ideals in these industries, in a landmark piece of legislation that's up for approval in the French government prohibiting the promotion of extreme dieting and weight loss.

This would apply to magazines, websites, and the runways as well as television ads. They are basically trying to protect young, impressionable girls from being brainwashed into thinking this type of extreme weight is attractive, desirable, or at it's worst, a new "acceptable" standard.

There are actually such serious offenders as websites that have the gall to promote thinness and anorexia as well as the eating disorder bulimia by offering tips and hints to those that suffer these horrible, life destroying disease, to get themselves into smaller sizes and get their weight down.

Spain has actually already banned ultra thin models from the runways after they became concerned that models in Spain, where models were traditionally envied for their more curvy, healthy bodies started shrinking more and more. They instituted the ban on especially skinny models by saying that you had to have a certain BMI, or body fat mass index, in order to be able to strut your stuff on the professional fashion runways.

I've actually seen some of the pictures of the models that were able to walk the runways prior to this issue being brought to the national forefront, and they really do look sickly. It's hard to imagine that any of them ate more than 800 calories per day, which is well below the standard accepted 1500 or so, especially for these women who typically must be five foot nine or taller to model clothes, that's well under the calorie allowance they should be consuming.

I'm usually against government interference in issues that seem they should be privately regulated by the proprietors of businesses such as written and print publications, websites, and fashion shows. However, in this case, I think it's clearly a case of the government stepping in where needed, since these institutions are clearly not governing themselves properly and are openly promoting an image of sexiness and desirability and equating it with being severely underweight, to the point of ribs stick out and body fat being at dangerous lows.

As I talked about earlier, the death of a young Brazilian model was what really prompted this awareness that the fashion industry was essentially partially responsible for the way women like her torture themselves to attain a certain body type.

Attaining and maintaining weights that were severely under the recommended weight and height chart certainly isn't something that is all the fashion and beauty industry's fault, but it certainly has added fuel to the fire for the perfectionist personality types that tend to take these types of ideals to extremes and resort to extreme measures to conform to this supposed "ideal".

Some psychologists argue that women who tend to starve themselves and succumb to eating disorders such as anorexia, bulimia and body dysmorphic disorder would have had these torturous diseases whether the fashion industry promoted thinness as fashionable and sexy or not, but I disagree. I think that the fashion industry has greatly contributed to this false ideal.

I'm all for eating healthy and maintaining an active lifestyle, but there comes a point when this just becomes a sick obsession where the victim feels they have to resort to starvation and extreme measures to get unnaturally thin for their body frame.

I'm glad, along with countless other normal sized women (I'm a healthy build and size, nothing too skinny), that there are measures being taken to help end this trend of extremity and save women and especially younger girls from a lifetime of low self worth and esteem, and torturing themselves to stay too thin.