Teen Magazines Taught Me to Hate My Body
Image Description: A worn stack of teen magazines, spines out. Photo courtesy of Shelley Mann Hite.
Starting in middle school, I so hated the way my body looked I would sneak my mom's SlimFast chocolate shakes from the pantry to guzzle for breakfast, eat Special K cereal for breakfast and lunch during the summer (followed by a sensible dinner, naturally), weigh my portions on the scale on our kitchen counter while my family ate in the dining room, and track my points using the Weight Watchers booklets Mom brought home from her meetings.
My mother modeled dieting as a lifestyle, sure, but she never outwardly encouraged me to diet. I never blamed her for my dieting. In my memory, dieting was always my idea, my little secret.
I've always wondered why I blamed myself rather than blaming her. But something clicked when I picked up and flipped through one of the old teen magazines I used to devour starting as a tween.
Desperate to imagine a life as bigger than the Ohio suburbs I lived in, I spent my babysitting earnings subscribing to every teen magazine I could find, certain they offered a blueprint for the kind of life I wanted to live. Teen, Seventeen, YM, Sassy: I subscribed to them all.
Now, the pages of those magazines instantly transport me back to the 1990s, when I was a fat kid wearing chunky brown corduroy jumpers and my dad's old flannel shirts, rubbing my wrists with Clinique Happy perfume samples. I remembered the way the models in every fashion spread were impossibly skinny, but not the constant, unrelenting messaging—rooted in diet culture, which was on an upswing—that my body was all wrong.
In each issue’s body column or health column or whatever that particular magazine called it, the baseline assumption was that every teenage girl was on a diet. The advice was never framed as Here’s what to eat if you’re on a diet. It was, Here’s how not to break your diet. It was never, Here’s this fun new snack to try, but always, Here’s how to cut the fat and sugar and calories from your diet.
The magazines told me how I could “combat calories” and “do battle” with my sweet tooth. They reminded me how “mindless munching packs on the pounds.” Reading these articles month after month, is it any surprise I grew up convinced I needed to be on a diet?
Image Description: Two copies of Seventeen Magazine lay at an angle, on top of each other. The top copy shows the stars of Josie and the Pussycats and advice for “stress-free swimsuits;” the bottom copy asks, “Is that my butt? 99 jeans that really flatter.” Photo courtesy of Shelley Mann Hite.
According to these articles, our bodies weren't just too big; every part of them was all wrong. Our arms needed to be sculpted, our butts needed to be firmed, our “wide calves” needed to be toned. If you had a noticeable tummy, like I did, it needed to be “tamed.” Our choices were either to whip our stomachs into submission through endless crunches or to hide them under empire waists and A-lines.
If my stomach was not flat, I understood that it was only because I wasn't working hard enough to achieve that. And hard work was central to the teen magazine formula for beauty. A hefty chunk of the content in every issue talked about the importance of looking attractive. From complicated skincare routines to hair drying and makeup techniques I needed to master, to fashion trends I needed to follow, being beautiful, the magazines told me, takes time—lots of it.
I couldn’t just swipe some eyeshadow on my lids and be done with it. No. I needed to stock my bathroom with liquid liner, gel liner, cream shadow, powder shadow, eyelash curlers, mascara. It was not enough to paint my toenails. I needed to stage an at-home pedicure involving soaking, scrubbing, pushing cuticles, filing, shaping, smoothing, polishing.
And why were we supposed to go to all this trouble? The magazines made this clear, too: for the boys.
In every issue, we heard from actual boys from all across the country, who told us what they were looking for in a girl. Boys, we learned, valued beauty over all else. They wanted someone fit and thin, but not skinny. Someone who put effort into their appearance but who didn’t care too much about looks. (That being attracted to girls was never presented as an option is another topic for another time.)
If you’re wondering why American pop culture took a hard left into diet culture in the ’80s and ’90s, the answer can be found in the pages of another magazine to which we subscribed when I was growing up: Working Mother. Women were entering the workforce en masse and being told they could have it all—motherhood and the C-suite.
It's no surprise that, as women started to come into their power, we saw a pendulum shift back to the expectation that girls should spend every bit of their energy and time on their appearance. It's the same shift we're seeing now, post-#MeToo, post-Lizzo-era body positivity movement, as Ozempic takes center stage.
Research has found that teenagers can be negatively influenced by media—particularly teen magazines. A 1995 study by psychologist Dr. Julia Shaw showed that the more women read magazines and see images of the “thin ideal,” the more likely they are to report behavior aligned with disordered eating. A 2008 study from the American Psychological Association confirmed that exposure to fashion magazines correlated with higher body dissatisfaction among women.
I bought into this messaging for decades, my self-esteem directly correlating with the number on the scale, which rose and fell regardless of my efforts to make my body smaller. Well into adulthood, I continued to try new diets and continued to convince myself it was all my idea.
These evolved with the prevailing trends. In the early 2000s, I tried the plan outlined in the book French Women Don't Get Fat. In the 2010s, I followed a diet where you were supposed to eat vegan all day until 6 p.m., then eat meat for dinner if you wanted.
In 2015, I stopped drinking alcohol for good and quickly shed pounds, then gained them back when I started replacing booze with sweet treats. At that point, I tried drastically cutting my sugar intake, switching out all my usual grocery staples and skipping dessert night after night until my daughter asked me how long I was going to be on my diet.
That word “diet,” a word I’d been careful to never say out loud in front of my girls, stopped me in my tracks. I refused to model a lifetime of dieting for them.
My daughters, too, inadvertently helped me learn to stop hating my body. As I watched them run and play and grow, I watched their tummies bow out in the same way mine always had, watched their hips and thighs follow the same curves as mine do. I realized I’d spent my entire life trying desperately to make my body look different than the bodies of my beautiful girls. That realization made my heart hurt. Our bodies were never supposed to be “tamed” and transformed into some certain physical ideal. They are meant to be loved—and to look just exactly the way they look.
Remember how in The Wizard of Oz, once the man behind the wizard curtain is revealed he loses all his power over Dorothy? What a revelation that the voices in my head, the ones I’d always thought were me berating myself—saying I was not good enough, that if only I worked harder I would be more beautiful—were not me at all. They were my mother. They were my grandmother. They were some magazine editor whose job it was to sell makeup and skinny jeans.
And all along I was the one with the power to return home to my body and love it.
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