• Children as young as six years of age are showing symptoms of anorexia.
  
• That pre-school children are being sent off to school with fat-free lunches.
  
• That women continue to be pressured to look like something or someone else.
  
• That diet and so-called "health", industries continue to make enormous profits by promising success in what is doomed to failure (permanent weight loss).
  
• That certain cultural attitudes continue to impact negatively on women's self-esteem, self-worth and value.
  
• You are saying NO to attitudes which cause young girls to strive for thinnnes, to recklessly abandon their own sense of self, to succumb to eating and drug addictions and, finally, to risk their very lives.
  
• You are saying NO to a narcissistic society where thinnness has been pursued by women at the cost of their health, their wealth, their brain power, their personal power and their spiritual power.
  
  

There are at least 1200 reasons for not dieting. In the days of calories, calorie-counting diets recommended restriction to 1200 calories a day. The World Health Organisation calculates starvation as beginning at anything less than that. So the women who consumed only 1000 calories a day - and there were - many were actually starving themselves.

Most women are familiar with the complications risked by dieting as listed here by Jenny O'Dea, Nutritionist at Sydney University:

• compromised growth
  
• anaemia
  
• hormonal imbalance (especially oestrogen)
  
• delayed menarche and menstrual abnormalities
  
• poor bone density leading to osteoporosis
  
• constipation
  
• yo-yo syndrome
  
• reduced concentration
  
• tiredness
  
• irritability
  
• predisposition to binge eating patterns
  
  

So why diet?

While dieting was around long before it became a sure way of selling magazines, there is evidence to suggest that Australian women in the 1940s did not diet, nor were they pressured to do so. Since the 1940s Western women have continued to increase in body mass index (a proportional ratio based on height and weight). The fifties celluloid goddesses such as Marilyn Monroe, Esther Williams, Sophia Loren and Mamie Van Doren were voluptuous and reflected the women of their time. When the sixties introduced Twiggy and the "Shrimp", a look was created that was not congruent with the healthy body mass index of the female population.

The body mass index of Western women has continued to increase since, but that of female fashion models has decreased to a dangerously low level. Imitating these women is indeed a health risk and some have suggested that advertisements displaying unhealthy models should carry a health warning as cigarettes do.

Many women are unfortunately influenced by the fashion industry which displays its wares on human coat hangers. The product is portrayed as desirable, but attaining it relies on the consumer transforming herself to have it. Wedding gowns are a classic example. How many women have starved to fit into their gowns only to expand again by the time the honeymoon is over?

Imagine other industries applying the "consumer must transform to fit" principle. Take the car industry for example; imagine a sleek new model is released this season, but in order to purchase it the consumer must go on a diet so that she can fit into it. And anyone she wants to travel with her must do the same! How many cars would be sold? How many blokes would fall for that?

And yet women struggle to fit. They are continually conned into reducing themselves, conned that by reducing themselves they will increase their desirability and success. And reduced they are: reduced to self-loathing and a sickening sense of failure. Women must be doomed to failure when they measure their success by centimetres or kilojoules. Only 5% of the population is naturally thin so the other 95% will fail in their attempts to attain thinness. Just as they will fail at the most absurd ambition of the lot: trying to look like someone else, especially a two-dimensional ideal.

Failed attempts to look like someone else lead to further suffering, so that women lose their personal power and self-respect. They find themselves imprisoned by imposed standards so that, at times, even leaving the house becomes too much effort. Their self-talk becomes "I'll go to ..." when I lose weight" or "If only I were ... " etc. Depression and agoraphobia follow and in some cases body image becomes distorted to anorexic proportions. Cycles of dieting, exercising, binging and purging take over and soon there is little joy in life at all. Life and personal fulfilment become measured by impossible standards and the freedom to be oneself disappears.

Fat phobia, anorexia, bulimia and other dieting addictions are sweeping through this country at an ever-increasing rate as we follow in the footsteps of the United States, which has registered over 11 million cases of eating disorders. Schools are becoming hothouses for fad diets and fashion statements. The improvement industries of plastic surgery, body training, "health" and dieting are thriving, but the question is, are you?

In 1998 the US diet industry turned over $50 million dollars, while their victims drank liquid protein drinks made up of horses hooves and water, suffered injections of formulas based on horses urine and consumed masses of speed-based appetite control pills (amphetamines).

You are here today to celebrate your own uniqueness. Look around. There's not an imitation of you in the place. Here you are like a great garden of flowers, wonderful in your diversity, extraordinary in your individuality, powerful in your collective.

So what about the good news? My job is to spread the good news. The good news that the time is ripe for women to take control over their own lives and destinies. Not since matriarchal times have women had the potential for power as they do today. They are at home in the corporations, the media, in commerce and finance, but how many are at home in their bodies?

Women are on the verge of a new frontier: feeling good as opposed to looking good. When omen stop trying to please through appearance, when they stop trying to conform to highly stylised and exaggerated images of female beauty so prevalent in advertising, media and fashion, when they Ô"come out" and tell the truth about how it is to be in a female body, when they celebrate the unique and diverse beauty of other women, then they will set the stage for self-acceptance en masse and individually. Self-acceptance will make women a consumer force to be reckoned with. When they stop being conned into buying products to make them into someone or something else they will be heard all the way to the bankruptcy of the industries which prey on them.

The process of empowering women inevitably involves the media, which has the power to transport ideas and images almost instantaneously around the globe. But in my view, as a psychologist, the media is still in its adolescent stage of development. It is pumped up, full of its own importance, knows its rights, but is often reckless when it comes to its responsibilities. And its responsibilities are great whilst it can blast images, thoughts, ideas, opinions, cultural attitudes into our homes, our heads, our hearts. Images capable of rendering us powerless, passive voyeurs. I remember having a discussion with George Negus about 60 Minutes years ago. He was claiming teachers had a greater influence on minds than the bad news on television. Twenty years down the track many teachers feel they are fighting a losing battle, as do parents. Try telling your growing daughter she doesn't need to worry about her weight when she is bombarded with images of skeletal models, try telling your son not to drink too much when his radio station speaks of a "big night outÕ"as if it were some heroic achievement. It is about time the industry grew up, along with other industries such as fashion, which could start by making clothes that fit people. Now there's an idea. And the good news is that women are going to exert their consumer powers to help the media grow up

Firstly by refusing to purchase the rubbish that is put out. Australians consume more magazines than any other Western country. So stop buying them until they start telling the truth. Write in and complain to TV producers about the content of their shows; affect the ratings. If your child gets sick from media junk then let them know. If you're a woman in the media, stop supporting unhealthy portrayals of women, because at the moment we are breeding a generation of young men who really believe women should look like "Babewatch" and Video Hits.

It's time isn't it to make way for the next generation, so that young women can grow into their full size, strength and power. So that young men can live consciously rather than half-stoned. I believe the tide is on the turn. I believe things are going to change and in a BIG way (if you'll pardon the pun). They must for the sake of our young. The young women I have the privilege to work with in my Mirror Mirror Process respond so well to the unpeeling of the image-making process they have been subjected to in their short lives. They are so happy when they realise that underneath all the surface pressures to look like this or that, there is a unique wonderful person already made.

They would like me to share some of their discoveries with you today:

• It's what's inside of you that counts.
  
• All girls are beautiful both inside and out.
  
• Everyone's important and everyone's special.
  
• Be proud of who you are.
  
• Girl power is believing in yourself.
  
• Smile and be happy and don't worry about what other people tell you.
  
• Be yourself and be cool.
  
• Be what you wannabe and live life to the max.
  
  

Mirror Mirror's positive messages have been shouted from Australia all the way to New York where they were echoed by hundreds of other women and girls. They are the same messages that we all long to hear from lovers, husbands, families, friends. But it's only when a woman finally hears them from within her own self, that her full potential will be released. Then she will be truly seen and heard . No longer will she be a silent victim of multi-million dollar industries which feed on her poor sense of worth.

Thankyou

Denise Greenaway's keynote speech for the YWCA at No Diet Day, Sydney, Australia, 1999
 

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