One thing that has surprised me since reverting to Islam, is how many young sisters there are that want to be stick thin, and think they are fat when they are not. We have hijab, we don’t put ourselves on display for public evaluation, so where has this mindset in some of our young sisters come from?

Germaine Greer, one of the most influential of the feminists, wrote in a recent book: "When “the Female Eunuch" was written [by Greer, 30 years ago] our daughters were not cutting or starving themselves. On every side speechless women endure endless hardship, grief and pain, in a world system that creates billions of losers for every handful of winners." She goes on to explain that the "sexual liberation" of western society has harmed women far more than it has harmed men, that the pornography industry has expanded exponentially in the last thirty years, and how the fashion industry is very much like the pornography industry, in the way that it is controlled by men and puts women on display for the pleasure of men. Greer and other feminists identify the fashion industry as one of the contemporary enslavers of women. Not only for putting women on display in this way, but because the industry promotes a completely unnatural and unhealthy ideal body image, which countless women put themselves through hell to try to achieve, putting their health and even their lives in danger in the process, and which most of them fail to achieve, leaving them feeling ugly and worthless.

The pharmaceutical and cosmetic surgery industries sell their products by making women paranoid about possible flaws in their faces and bodies, paranoia that can lead to women spending huge amounts of money and even going under the surgeon's knife to "correct" imagined flaws. In extreme cases, women repeatedly have plastic surgery, because there is nothing wrong with their bodies or faces, and the surgery does not correct the beauty flaws that exist only in their heads. This condition is called "body dysmorphic disorder" – some women with eating disorders have this condition, seeing herself as fat when in reality she is emaciated.

Whilst as Muslim women we wear hijab and so do not put ourselves on display, we are still vulnerable to the marketing strategies of these industries, making us feel insecure about the way we look. We may not be on display to the public, but we can still see our own bodies and compare them with how we believe they are “supposed” to look. So whilst hijab protects us to some extent from this form of oppression, we need to take further steps to stop them influencing our minds in this way. We also need to understand just how unnatural and unhealthy the so called “ideal” body image of these industries is.

Many of the men who control the fashion industry, including some of its most well known names, are gay men. This has a big influence upon what the fashion industry considers to be the ideal body shape for a woman: very tall and thin with minimal curves – this is not what a woman looks like, but what an adolescent man looks like! And this is not where the sickness of the western “ideal” body image ends. A term that has been used many times by the fashion industry is "heroin chic". So what exactly does that mean? To put it simply, it means looking like a heroin addict. Forty or more years of decadence in the music industry, whose most famous names have fallen victim to drug abuse, has made drug abuse "cool". The heroin addict does not look after himself properly, even if he is earning millions from his fame, he still does not eat properly, and looks emaciated. This attitude towards drug use has spread through all the entertainment industry, film, fashion, celebrity culture. Fashion models frequently take drugs to help keep themselves as starved as they need to be to keep their careers. So the ideal image that women are expected to aspire to in western culture is that of an adolescent male heroin addict. You honestly can’t get more unnatural and unhealthy than that!

One of the tragedies of this, is that many adolescent women who are tall and curveless at age 12, match this “ideal” body image better then than they do when they are 16 and have a fully grown woman’s figure. So instead of being pleased with their blossoming womanhood, they see their growing curves as fat that is bad and needs to be eliminated. Instead of feeling confident they feel ugly. Eating disorders frequently start in the teenage years, many women falling victim to them before they are fully grown. The fashion industry and its unnatural ideals may not be the only cause of eating disorders, but there can be little doubt that it is a major factor.

It’s only in the decadence of western non-Muslim society, where women are objectified to the extent that they are, that anyone would even ask the question about what the ideal woman should look like. The truth is that a woman should be healthy, and that is it. Men are programmed to find healthy women attractive. Health and fertility go together and the features that men find most attractive in women are also indicators of good health and their ability to bear children.

Our sisters are clearly not immune to the influence of the fashion and pharmaceutical industries. From a young age they are exposed to their adverts on the TV and in magazines, and the attitudes and opinions other young women. We should not underestimate the damage that these industries are doing to the self esteem and confidence of our young women. Wearing hijab may help in that it allows our sisters to opt out of being on display for the pleasure of men, however they are still being influenced by the “ideals” of these industries and feel that they have to live up to their impossible standards.

On top of all this, there is the advice from the medical profession, warning about the dangers of obesity. There is nothing wrong with this, right? Doctors just want people to be healthy. However, here we come across another evil of western capitalism… once you leave the good advice of the medical profession on the prevention and treatment of obesity, you come across the diet industry. This is a multi billion pound industry, and their main wares are diets and diet products that are not designed to help people lose excess fat, but are designed (just like in the fashion and pharmaceutical industries) to prey on the insecurities of young women, and keep them buying their products. The products and “diets” sold by this industry are at best mediocre and at worst very damaging to the health. Rather than promoting the correct advice on how to lose excess fat and keep it off for life – which can be done without spending any extra money at all (in fact many people would save money through buying much less junk food!) – they want people to buy their products and keep on buying their products, whether because they don’t really work in the first place and you never actually become thin, or because you become thin then put the weight back on again when you revert back to your unhealthy lifestyle, or because once you are thin you have to keep on buying more products to stay thin (known as “maintenance”). Not only does this industry harm your bank balance, it harms your health too. Few diets on the market today (yes, it’s a market, but shouldn’t it be about education rather than selling products!?) distinguish between weight loss and fat loss. Many such diets result in large initial losses of weight, which gives a false sense of progress and achievement, whilst the weight lost is water, glycogen and even healthy tissue such as muscle, rather than actual fat. As the diet progresses, the focus on weight loss rather than fat loss causes loss of muscle tissue. Not only is this false progress, it is actually negative progress, as muscle tissue burns a lot of calories, and losing muscle tissue slows the metabolism. A slower metabolism means that it will become harder and harder to lose weight, and that the body will try to store more fat in the future. This is why so many people get fat again after dieting. They go from diet to diet, usually ending up even fatter than they were at the start of each diet. This is actually less healthy than just being obese in the first place.

So it shouldn’t come as a surprise that so many sisters are falling victim to this, and spending time, money and effort, losing their self esteem and self confidence, and damaging their health in trying to live up to an impossible “ideal.” Now we are aware of this problem, what can be done about it?

Firstly we need to educate ourselves about what is healthy. The first and most important thing is to realise that we are all individuals, we have different builds, different heights and so on, so what is a healthy dress size for one woman may be unhealthy for another woman. There is no ideal body size or shape, the ideal is to be healthy. The next thing to understand is that the focus needs to be on body composition not on weight. We all know that muscle is heavier than fat, but do we know that muscle is a highly metabolically active tissue that burns a lot of calories even while we sleep? Do we know about the devastating effects on someone’s metabolism if they lose a significant amount of muscle? So to simply focus on weight is potentially very damaging to the health. All the health risks related to being obese are caused by excess fat. Weight has little to do with it. Many of the world’s greatest athletes – people at the pinnacle of health and fitness – would be in the overweight or obese category according to weight or body mass index alone. We need to educate ourselves and our young sisters about what a healthy body fat percentage is, and on the importance of doing exercise to build and maintain healthy muscle and bone tissue. Loss of bone mass (which can happen as a result of not eating enough and not exercising enough) increases the risk of osteoporosis, something that many women in the west suffer from.

The next thing we need to educate ourselves and our young sisters about, is what needs to be done to start and maintain a healthy lifestyle, and as a result have a healthy body composition. Firstly we need to know which foods are healthy and which are not, and the effects on our body of unhealthy food. Then we need to learn about different kinds of exercise, which exercises build and maintain muscle, which exercises burn off excess fat. We need to know about how to make healthy eating and exercise a part of a healthy lifestyle, and why quick fix strategies like “going on a diet” don’t work.

In addition to all this, we need to educate ourselves and our communities about the marketing strategies of the fashion, pharmaceutical and diet industries, and where they get their “ideal” body image from. Everyone needs to understand the importance of protecting girls and young women from its pernicious influence. We must learn to rise above it and love ourselves the way we are and aspire to be healthy, first and foremost. Our confidence should come from within, not from other people’s evaluation of what we look like. We need to educate girls and young women about how hijab goes some way to protect them from such influences, but we also need to realise that hijab alone is not enough and that we must ensure that youngsters’ minds are not being influenced by the unhealthy “ideals” and marketing strategies of these industries.

Finally, we need to understand that beauty comes from being healthy. For someone who has excess fat to lose, they will lose it by making healthy changes in their lifestyle such as doing more exercise and choosing healthy food for their staple diet. For someone that doesn’t have excess fat to lose, the advice is exactly the same for them to stay in good health, i.e. eat healthy food and do regular exercise. We must understand that you have to be healthy to lose excess fat, and that losing weight does not make you healthy.

Coming next:
・    How to get and maintain a healthy body composition.

by dhakiyya