Urdu-medium girls less concerned about weight than burger babes: study 
Daily Times Monitor
KARACHI: A study of how young Australian and Pakistani women perceive their bodies has yielded the interesting observation that within the Pakistani sample, young women from English-medium institutions expressed greater weight concern than did the Urdu-medium females.
The findings by Nargis Mahmud of the Department of Applied Psychology, F.G. College for Women and Nadia Crittenden of School of Psychology, University of Wollongong, Australia appeared in an article British Journal of Psychology (2007, 98, 187197).
The comparative study of the body image of Australian and Pakistani young females has thus indicated that with increasing globalization, there is, among the educated, a modern culture that touches all countries and which is beginning to override old traditions and place a more powerful emphasis on physical appearance. In view of increasing globalization, it is difficult to predict the extent of the future influence of Western culture on these Eastern cultures and their life-styles.
The results revealed that, although all the groups identified a similar body shape as the ideal, the Australian females expressed significantly higher levels of body dissatisfaction on all measures of body image than did the Pakistani females. Body shape and unhealthy eating attitudes, which were once thought to be wholly confined to Western women, have emerged among non-Western populations. The attitudes towards body shape and weight prevailing in the West seem to be non-existent or uncommon in other cultures until such cultures begin to adopt the values of Western cultures. It is suggested that, in traditional non-Western societies, a relatively fat body is regarded as a sign of health and a symbol of prosperity.
The research compares body image attitudes in Muslim Pakistani and non- Muslim Caucasian Australian young women. However, as the Pakistani sample came from very prestigious English-medium schools, it cannot be viewed as representative of the Pakistani female population. Further, the single measure that was used to assess body image in the study seems insufficient, given that the reliable measurement of body image is considered to require multiple measures.
In Pakistan, government-funded institutions are Urdu-medium, traditional culturally and have English as a separate subject. Private institutions use English as a medium of instruction and mostly follow Western traditions in teaching and rules. These two types also reflect differences in the socio-economic level of students with the former representing the lay population and the latter representing the upper social class.
It was expected that the Pakistani females from the upper social class would be comparable to the Caucasian females in their body image attitudes (because of being more exposed to Western culture), whereas the middle or lay class Pakistani females would express more positive attitudes towards their bodies than these two groups. The sample comprised 149 Australian, 145 Pakistani Urdu-medium and 142 Pakistani
English-medium college females (representing the middle and upper social class, respectively). The participants ages ranged from 17 to 22. The average age of the Australian, Pakistani Urdu-medium and English-medium females was 18. Australian females were recruited from the University of Wollongong and Pakistani students were recruited from colleges in Islamabad and Rawalpindi. Pakistani data were taken from both Urdu- and English-medium institutions to include females with varying levels of exposure to Western culture and representing differing social classes.
Overall, the Australian females showed significantly lower body esteem and greater body image dissatisfaction than did either group of Pakistani females on all measures of body image. Contrary to expectations and earlier findings, Pakistani females studying in English-medium colleges expressed significantly lower body image dissatisfaction, fewer body shape concerns and higher body esteem than did the Caucasian females.
Higher body esteem and lower body image dissatisfaction among the Pakistani females as compared with the Australian females could be explained mainly in terms of social, cultural and religious differences between the two groups. Lower body dissatisfaction among women in non-Western countries has been traditionally attributed to their different attitudes towards beauty and to a preference for a larger body shape in those cultures.
However, in the present study, both Australian and Pakistani females indicated that their ideal body shape was significantly smaller than their actual body size. In fact, the ideal shape of both groups was found to be strikingly similar. This indicates the importance of factors other than cultural standards. Slade (1982) suggested body dissatisfaction could be an outcome of critical comments from others. Among the Western females, social pressures from parents and peers and weight-related criticism from these groups have been identified as significant correlates of body image dissatisfaction.
While comparing the two Pakistani groups, the English-medium females expressed significantly greater body shape concerns than did the Urdu-medium females.
The results also indicate that the traditional standards of beauty among young Pakistani females of upper socio-economic groups are being replaced by what is attractive in Western terms. Australian as well as Pakistani females perceived their current figure to be significantly larger than their ideal shape and the shape they thought was opposite-attractive and women-attractive.
This shows that there is not much difference in the idealization of slimness across cultures, and also contradicts the common perception that Asian womens satisfaction with their bodies arises from a different ideal of body size and shape. Some other research has also demonstrated that preference for thinness is found in all groups of women regardless of their cultural background.
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] are more aware of wish for wearing skin tight dresses and obviously for that they need to have less weight and they do work on that.
AND FAST FOOD
ABOUT THEIR HEALTH.
