Losing weight is becoming an American pastime.

Eighty percent of American women are dissatisfied with their appearance, said Gulin Guneri-Minton, a counselor in the NIU Counseling and Student Development Center.

The need to be thin is causing women and girls of all ages to have serious eating disorders like anorexia and bulimia, she said.

Guneri-Minton said 1 percent of teenage girls and 5 percent of college-age women have extreme eating disorders.

Some women have low self-esteem and suffer from depression, so they go on countless diets to lose weight, she said.

Kathy King, a social worker at the DeKalb High School said Americans are obsessed with how they look.

This obsession is affecting girls, high school girls in particular, because they want to fit in, she said.

“Their worth is not just about how they look, but about what they are doing,” King said.

The issue of ideal beauty is a broader issue.

“It’s about what we think is important,” she said.

Guneri-Minton said average-sized women see super models and women on television and in magazines and believe they need to look like that so they adopt unhealthy eating habits, abuse laxatives and diet pills, obsessively work-out and induce vomit after binge eating.

Super model Heidi Klum had a baby in May and by June lost all the weight gained from the pregnancy. Klum worked out for several hours a day and followed a very strict diet of greens and whole grains.

Losing all that weight in such a short time is unhealthy and people should not expect themselves to do it, she said.

Women comparing themselves to female characters on sitcoms do not realize about three quarters of those actresses are considered underweight, Guneri-Minton said.

Lisa Kinsella, a dietetic intern for the Wellness Center, said images of women on television are unrealistic and provide “an unattainable idea of thinness.”

There is this notion that there is an ideal body shape, which there is not, she said.

Media portrayals associate thinness with beauty.

“The thinner you are, the more beautiful you are; the thinner you are, the more successful you are,” Guneri-Minton said.

Paris Hilton does nothing warranting a great deal of publicity but receives much attention from the media because she fits the ideal: Hilton is tall, thin, blonde and rich, Guneri-Minton said.

This is why the new Dove campaign featuring “real women” is causing so much controversy, she said.

The Dove women accept their bodies with curves and imperfections and are not ashamed to show off, which is shocking some women because the Dove women are not an example of the perfect body, but rather the normal body.

“It’s just mind-boggling, it [is] just insane that we as a society are so focused on losing weight and so focused on body images, she said.