"I should like to draw the committee’s attention to three aspects of the debate which are often overlooked or misunderstood. The first is the role of the diet industry and the ways in which its practices contribute to the growing problems of obesity. The second is the dominance of an ultra thin aesthetic which dominates our visual field and undermines girls', women's and increasingly boys' experience of their own bodies leading to disordered eating in general and obesity in particular. The third is the intergenerational transmission of eating problems and obesity."

What is the role of the fashion industry in promoting an anorexic-like slimness of the feminine form in contemporary Western society? Is it viable for the fashion industry to begin to produce more diverse images of the female body? Copyright Elise Slater

Early report mapping the socio-economical impact of the troubled body by Jess Miller with additional research from Anybody.

Read the results of BEAT's fashion inquiry held in September 2007 including comments by AnyBody member Elise Slater. BEAT asks the question has fashion got it's priorities right and what, if anything is its role in incidences of eating disorders?

"In classrooms around the world girls swap tips on how to eat less, how to ratchet up their exercise and how to mimic those perfect bodies they see staring out at them from music videos, TV soaps, the catwalk, magazines and billboards."

This is an important report by one of the founding members of AnyBody, Jessica Miller. The cost of obesity on the NHS and government is soon to become the profit boom of the diet industry and further ammunition for the fashion industry to exploit the thin ideal. Dieting has become the norm and will be hailed as the cure-all. There is increasing evidence that dieting itself is obesogenic, resulting in complex and distorted relationships to eating, food and body image. Yet the diet industry is used to sponsor the government’s strategy to restrict ‘calories in’ and to regulate the advertising and labelling of food, especially that targeted at young children. The government is working hard to make environmental changes to encourage more ‘calories out’ activity in urban areas, and the (often unused) gym membership profits for the fitness industry is expected to rise and rise. So why are we still getting fatter? The messages, opportunities and impulses of the social reality of everyday life are being ignored, and it’s making big money The cost is personal, but with wide and growing impact.