Dieting, exercise, and thinness messages in magazines for young women, 1956--2005

This study assessed Seventeen and YM from 1956 through 2005 to determine if a trend to a thin ideal exists in the magazines most frequently read by teenage girls. The average body size of cover models portrayed in Seventeen did not show any statistically significant changes across time. Seventeen demonstrated a linear increase in content related to exercise and/or fitness (F(1,48)=12.544, p=0.001) and both dieting and exercise simultaneously (F(1,48)=26.439), p<0.001) over the 50 year span. Seventeen showed a curvilinear relationship between time and content relating to dieting (F(1,48), 5.869, p=0.005). A trend of body size was discovered in YM with the average model size increasing between 1956 and 2005 (F(1,10)=7.827, p=0.019). YMshowed an increase in content related to dieting and/or nutrition F(1,47)=12.786, p=0.001), exercise (F(1,47)=13.109, p=0.001), and multifaceted body plans (F(1,47)=12.555, p=0.001). Overall this study found that messages about dieting and exercise have fluctuated with time.