Body image and confidence can be impacted by summer months, says Worcester university PhD student
George Mycock is a full-time PhD student at the University of Worcester who's been impacted by an eating disorder himself as a result of him having concerns about his body image
The impact of the warmer weather and summer season can affect people's body confidence and how they view their bodies, says a University of Worcester PhD student impacted by an eating disorder.
Eating disorder charity Beat estimate at least 1.25 million people in the UK are living with an eating disorder, with the summer known to lead to an increase in body image-related anxiety for those who have one.
29-year-old George Mycock is a full-time PhD student at the University of Worcester, with his main research centring around muscularity oriented psychosocial issues, focusing on the experiences of men in particular.
He says he suffered with his body image after being forced to stop playing rugby during his teenage years, which led to him developing eating concerns and behaviours.
"The story kind of started with my own lived experience with these concerns, so I had issues around muscularity and wanting to be super muscular and super lean and that led to me developing eating disorder symptoms," he said.
"We see in the research this thing called seasonal body image, which is this thing that comes up where when we look at the various seasons and summer tends to be the the primary concern, people find that they have increased body dissatisfaction.
"They think that their bodies look worse, they dislike it more and their thoughts start to centre around that."
George says some of the studies that have been done that kind of ask people why it is and why is it they feel like this tend to come up with four different reasons.
He said: "One of these reasons is the fact that they feel like there's more pressure through what they see like on social media, another one is direct pressure from friends, so people talking about the fact they want to lose some weight to go to the beach or something.
"Some people's coping mechanisms for these kind of things can also be to camouflage their body or to wear certain clothes to try and cover up areas of the body that they might feel ashamed of.
"Suddenly when it's hotter they can't do that, so they feel like they're displaying this thing they might feel intense dissatisfaction or stress around and the final reason is appearance comparisons."