WATCH: It’s National Eating Disorder Awareness week, and a Vancouver woman has created a public forum to discuss the issue. Nadia Stewart reports.
A Vancouver woman has launched an online petition aimed at encouraging fashion magazines to reduce the extent to which they alter images.
Erin Treloar is the founder of RAW Beauty Talks, an organization that advocates for transparancy in media. Like so many young girls, Treloar at one time time wanted to look just like the women she’d seen in magazines.
READ MORE: Local project encourages women to celebrate their ‘raw beauty’
But by the time she was 15 years old, the pursuit of perfection had taken its toll.
“Within a year, I had lost probably 40 lbs and I was at that time 89 lbs, 5′ 11”, had completely lost every single thing that I was looking for by losing that initial weight,” she said.
With the help of treatment, she overcame her eating disorder, but says there are many young girls who still struggle – and images on air and online of perfect celebrities and models are a big part of the problem.
This week, she launched a petition aimed at getting advertisers to change their Photoshopping ways. (You can view the petition here)
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“Girls are seeing these images more and more frequently, they’re coming at them younger, they’re being more and more produced so that we’re seeing these huge thigh gaps and bikini bridges are being talked about and its just everywhere,” said Treloar.
“I think if we don’t make a change right now, then it’s a really scary thought as to how the next generation of girls grows up confident, believing in themselves, focused on the things that really matter in life.”
Treloar says her goal is not to get magazines and advertisers to stop altering images altogether, which she says might not be realistic. Her hope is to see the extent to which the program is used significantly reduced.
“I think that the Photoshop has to stop when it comes to reducing the size of women, or increasing their cleavage or removing all their fine lines, or that freckle that they have. That’s really what I’d like to see stop.”
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