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aine Strauss was a young graduate student in psychology when a client she had been working with told her about a new illness.

"She had been suffering for years from what we now call bulimia nervosa"--an eating disorder characterized by binge eating followed by self-induced vomiting--"and had been unable to tell me what was going on with her," Strauss recalls. "She came into a session brandishing a copy of the New York Times Sunday Magazine with an article about it. She said, 'Oh my God, I'm not alone.'

"That was how I became interested in eating disorders," Strauss adds. "It was 1982. Fortunately, there were people at the University of Rochester [N.Y.] where I was doing my graduate work who had some expertise in the area. It was a time of tremendous change in our understanding of eating concerns."

Professor Strauss, a clinical psychologist whose research focuses on gender, joined the Macalester faculty 11 years ago. The recipient of the college's Excellence in Teaching Award in 2001, the warm and witty Strauss is well known for always being accessible to her students and strongly encouraging their research interests. About 25 of them have done research, often in collaboration with her, into eating disorders, body image and related subjects, and a half-dozen have gone on to work in the growing field.

Body doubles

Dissatisfaction with their bodies is so common among women of all ages that it's become "normative," as psychologists would say. Some studies report that as many as 90 percent of college-age women are dissatisfied with their bodies. Research by and among Macalester students suggests that the problem may be especially acute at Mac, although it's more of a low-level malaise for the vast majority of women students than something that disrupts their lives. "When women [at Mac] talk about their bodies, there seems to be this double vision," Strauss says. "On the one hand, they have a deep appreciation for political, societal and cultural variables that conspire to make women--and now men--want to have a certain kind of unrealistic body. Yet they are unable to give up that ideal. They will say, 'I know all bodies are beautiful, that we're not all meant to look like Gwyneth Paltrow, and yet when I look at my body I still feel like I need to look a certain way.'"

At what age do children--especially girls--first become aware of body "ideals" and begin to "internalize" ideal body images? Fifth-graders, as a group, appear to be blissfully unaware of "ideal" body types, but sixth-graders--in striking contrast--have already internalized the ideal of being "thin," according to data collected by high school students in New York as part of a collaboration Strauss has worked out with a high school teacher in Cedarhurst, N.Y. In psychological terms, these sixth-graders have "objectified body consciousness"--looking at their bodies as outsiders--and often feel a sense of shame about their bodies. "What our data is suggesting is that it has to do with educational environment," Strauss says. "When they move to middle school, there is something about that environment that really accelerates their understanding of cultural pressures."

Macalester students have collected data about objectified body consciousness and body image from about 800 research participants, ranging in age from 10 to over 60. Such research into how people see their bodies is taking place against an ominous backdrop: soaring obesity rates in the U.S. About 65 percent of U.S. adults are overweight and 31 percent are obese, according to the American Obesity Association.

"There is this very puzzling divide where ideal body images continue to be very slender while the average size of the American population continues to get larger and larger," Strauss notes. "It is an epidemic problem and it absolutely has health consequences.

"I have to confess in my own work that although I'm very interested in the classic eating disorders, I'm also very interested in issues of obesity. In our sample that we're studying, a lot of the kids are overweight. Trying to think about how we intervene was the focus of my sabbatical the past year. I find myself very torn. I spend half my time thinking about giving people the message that they shouldn't be worried about their bodies and the other half saying we should be worried."

Chocolate conclusions

Cortney Warren '00 was 14 when a fashion show agent told the 5-foot-8, 118-pound youth she had a body problem: "You need to stop exercising--your muscles are too defined," he advised her. She had been modeling for two or three years and was also an athlete and competitive swimmer.

"My mother was with me at the time and she just about hit the roof over that comment," Warren recalls. "We walked out and never went back. I didn't want to stop playing sports--I knew that--but I don't think I knew how profoundly disturbing his comment was until I got a little older. What message are we giving people when we say, 'Stop taking care of your body, stop taking care of yourself,' so they can attempt to aspire to the unrealistically thin standards of appearance in this country?"

The daughter of two academics--her mother is Macalester philosophy Professor Karen Warren--Cortney traveled widely as a child and became fascinated by how different cultures regard food, eating and the human body. A double major at Mac in psychology and Spanish, she did her senior honors thesis under Strauss, following up Strauss' previous research exploring the paradoxical effects of diet commercials on the eating behavior of chronic dieters. Typically, Strauss and her students offer research participants several bowls of snacks from which to choose, including M&M's. A "forbidden" food to any chronic dieter, M&M's are also easy to use and measure because each weighs one gram.

Warren and Strauss found that chronic dieters--far from being inspired to control their eating by commercials for dieting and exercising--ate twice as many M&M's as women who saw "neutral" commercials; in fact, chronic dieters tended to become binge-eaters of snack foods as they watched "thin" commercials, as if they were saying to themselves: "I'll never look like that. I've blown this diet already--I might as well eat the entire bowl."

Warren's Macalester research is being published in the International Journal of Eating Disorders. Now working on a Ph.D. in clinical psychology at Texas A&M, she won the American Psychological Association's national award for the best paper by a psychology graduate student for her master's thesis, which looks at cross-cultural components of body image in Mexican-American, Spanish and Euro-American women. That, too, will be published in the International Journal of Eating Disorders, and an abstract of it will appear in The American Psychologist, the journal of the APA.

"There's definitely a social-cultural component to eating disorders," Warren says. "We can say that Western, American culture is adding to body image problems, probably in both men and women. We assume that rates of eating disorders are lower in the Third World and among [poorer] minority groups, but we haven't studied it very well. I'm interested in how racial and ethnic minority groups in this country are influenced by an overarching environment that we assume to be potentially detrimental to one's body image. And do Western values of appearance and thinness influence ethnic minorities differently than Caucasian-American women?"

'Fatness' comes to India

For her senior honors thesis, done in collaboration with Professor Strauss and Professor Mahnaz Kousha in sociology, Suman Ambwani '03 persuaded 107 male and 113 female students to answer a questionnaire designed to test the relationship between their body images and their experiences of romantic love. "I enjoyed working on it because it was a project that people could relate to," Ambwani recalls. She found significant correlations between most measures of body esteem and several measures of romantic experiences.

Her adviser at Texas A&M University, where Ambwani is also pursuing a doctorate in psychology, encouraged her to present her Mac thesis at the 2003 meeting of the Association for Advancement of Behavior Therapy. She is currently working with Strauss to re-analyze the data--specifically, to test whether sex moderates the relationship between body esteem and romantic love experiences--and to have the data tested by independent researchers.

Her other research is taking her farther afield--to Bombay, India, her hometown. Recent studies suggest a growing trend toward body dissatisfaction and fear of fatness among Indian women. Ambwani interviewed 240 college-age women in Bombay as part of her master's thesis. She is focusing on ways to measure eating-related attitudes and behaviors across cultures, in India and the U.S.

"When I go home I see quite a large crowd of college-age women who seem real Westernized, who are eating American junk food, who have some of the same concerns that you see here in the United States. People aren't doing enough research on this topic in India, and if it is a problem, we need to address it now because we don't want it to get as bad as it is over here. Prevention's easier than cure....

"You also don't know if there really is a problem in India or if it's that researchers are using Western assessment instruments in India without testing to see if they're valid. So part of my study is also to see if the instruments are valid," Ambwani says.

Men and their muscles

Is body dissatisfaction as prevalent among men as among women? "I would venture to say yes," says Guy Cafri '01, another former Strauss student, who is pursuing a Ph.D. in clinical psychology at the University of South Florida. "From the research that I've seen, most males report at least some degree of dissatisfaction with their bodies with respect to muscularity."

As a man who has done research on male body images, Cafri jokes that he occasionally feels like a "unicorn" in a female-dominated field. But "look at the preponderance of men's health magazines that are out now. We didn't have those 15, 20 years ago. Just the sheer volume of men's magazines is illuminating in terms of how things have changed."

Cafri recently broadened his research to examine why people pursue suntans. Although his research includes both genders, women are three times more likely to use tanning salons and sunlamps. "With tanning salons, people actually think that there aren't any adverse health effects just because it's not the sun. From the research that we know, there's a huge health effect for people who go to tanning salons and who subsequently have melanoma....We hope to develop a more comprehensive understanding of this topic with the hope of ultimately designing interventions to reduce sunbathing tendencies, because sun exposure causes skin cancer."

Battling obesity

Professor Strauss and five of her current students are following up a wealth of existing research on developing effective treatments for eating disorders, especially bulimia nervosa. They are looking beyond specific techniques to see the nature of the therapist-client relationship. "In particular, we're assessing the extent to which therapists help to foster the autonomy and self-directedness of their clients and whether there's a relationship between therapist autonomy-support and therapeutic outcome"--measured by the client's improvement at the end of treatment as well as a year later. "From my perspective," Strauss says, "the project offers students an ideal opportunity to see how therapy is actually conducted while learning to listen with an especially sensitive ear to the therapy dynamics."

Strauss is excited that Macalester is developing an even more focused connection to its urban community. Her long-term ambition is to help psychology students get involved in a continuing public health relationship with St. Paul schoolchildren that helps kids and the community while also educating Macalester students at multiple levels. She serves on the advisory board of Project VIK (Very Important Kids), a program, developed at the University of Minnesota, in which 4th<en dash>6th-graders at urban, ethnically diverse, low-income schools learned about nutrition, exercise, problem-solving and weight teasing. To date, eight Macalester students have served as VIK program leaders and have learned first-hand about the successes--and challenges--of community-based research and intervention.

"I look at the obesity trends on those maps of the United States and they are gripping. I hate to use military metaphors but we are losing this battle. I'm nervous about how we're going to turn things around," Strauss says.

"On the other hand, I think of psychology as a discipline that has some unique insights to offer. We are meant to be the science of behavior and thinking about what helps people to get motivated for behavior change and what helps people to sustain behavior change over a period of time. Psychology is well positioned to do that. I'm very excited about that."

Jon Halvorsen is the managing editor of Macalester Today.