Advertising Campaign against Anorexia

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Hzdhrlv6jjk

(Above is, for me, the most impressive health campaign video against Anorexia. It is made by and for National Eating Disorders Association)

Advertising Campaign against Anorexia

Anorexia Nervosa, shortly AN or Anorexia, is an eating disorder characterized by refusal to maintain a healthy body weight and an obsessive fear of gaining weight. People who are haunted by the disease always feel hungry and dizzy because of malnutrition but they deny themselves all but very small quantities of food. Because this disease always happen to people who can at least afford a better and healthier recipe, Anorexia can be called starvation in an affluent age.

The symptoms of Anorexia are chronic and obsessive, which include rapid and dramatic weight loss, lanugo, preoccupation with cooking without eating what is cooked, abnormal diet which causes dangerous underweight, hiding or discarding food, frequent and strenous exercise, depression, solitude, distorted perception and over-anxiety concerning appearance. Anorexia is a slow but deadly process for the patient. They kill themselves through malnutrition and destruction of immune system induced by the mutual exacerbation between a distorted perception of body weight and a gradual weight loss.

I watched on Youtube about 15 advertising campaign against Anorexia and found several great ones. Most of them are short films and they are not the whole health campaigns but they act as important visual representatives of the campaign. I categorized them into several groups according to different styles of filming. The first group is largely narrative. The short films in the first group demonstrate the symptoms of Anorexia through narrating a short period of the patients’ everyday life and try to create a real scene for the self-torturous and abnormal behavior of gaunt anorexics. The second group is informative and uses remarkable verbal expressions of Anorexia symptoms and astonishing statistics and stories of people suffering from Anorexia, complemented by alarming pictures. The third group is characterized by speeches. Speakers talked in a serious tone about the reasons why people were afflicted with Anorexia and blamed the social media for their irresponsible twist of public opinions of women’s ideal figure. The third group is thus persuasive in this way. The fourth group, which is rare but impressive, used foods as the outlet of expression. They either used food as the representative of people (eg. “peeling an apple” equals “losing weight”), or used foods to show their functions (eg. “putting foods into a plate and then wiping them clean” means “hating foods”). The fourth type is deeply drenched in food metaphors because foods are directly linked to Anorexia.

The most impressive one for me was called “Public Health ED Campaign” made for National Eating Disorders Association. It is only 1 minute and 15 seconds long but deeply touched me by the abnormal and lamentable behavior of the female protagonist. The short film is voiceless with only gloomy piano sound which heightens visual impression. The woman in the film continuously touched her bodies and was anxious to find fat in her arms, legs, belly and waist but all that led to her actions was an illusion of obesity caused by anorexia. She looked into the mirror and found her so fat that she could hardly bear, but actually she was skinny and feeble. This film is dyed dark brown and haunted by tardy piano in order to show a chronic depression and abnormality of anorexics. It planted the female patient’s story into a real scene of her living room, which is in somber sloppiness with a big full-length mirror which was nothing but a misfit. From my point of view, this film is great and impressive just because it didn’t speak. It is the silent melancholy that dull my hearing but sharpen my vision.

http://www.nationaleatingdisorders.org/

Official website for National Eating Disorders Association