Development Roast Giving international development a proper roasting
As the Victoria Beckhams of this world have replaced the Marilyn Monroes on the centerfolds of magazines and advertisements selling everything from perfume to real estate, wide social effects have taken place in rich nations. Although size zeros are no heroes, adolescent girls and grown women the world over have succumb to chasing the promised good feel of the thinness ideal. At the extreme, this chase can lead to conditions diagnosed by mental health professionals as binge eating and disordered eating (which includes self-starvation, bingeing, purging and exercising obsessively), leading to more widely known conditions of anorexia (self starvation) and bulimia (regular self-induced cycles of binge-eating and vomiting), found to affect up to 5.7% and 7.3% of women in Western nations respectively (1). Both are addictive psychological attempts to take back control over inputs into the body and sometimes other aspects of life. And both are on the rise in less wealthy countries too as they transition into Western lifestyles brought to them through cultural and corporate marketing transmissions associated with the age of globalisation (2). Read More »