Hi, My name is Gretchen Hudson. I am the administrator and founder of Eradicate Eating Disorders NOW! ([email protected]) I started this petition on February 9, 2008. Please, add your name to the cause and send it on to as many people you can. Eating disorders have become a plague to our society and they need to be stopped. One way to lighten the load of pressure to be thin is to stop the media from glamorizing women/men who are dying of an eating disorder. Madrid has come before us, putting a ban on models who are too thin for the catwalk. I urge you to follow their lead. The emergence of the slender body type as a beauty standard for women is especially salient in the mass media, and several researchers have demonstrated how the female body depicted in the media has become increasingly thin (Garner, Garfinkel, Schwartz, & Thompson, 1980; Ogletree, Williams, Raffeld, Mason, & Fricke, 1990; Silverstein, Perdue, Peterson, & Kelly, 1986; Wiseman, Gray, Mosimann, & Ahrens, 1992). It was just years ago that the average weight of fashion models was 91% of the population mean. Now, it has dropped to under 80% and is falling lower and lower each year. Our models are dying of illnesses such as anorexia nervosa and bulimia. Are these shrinking people the role models we want our children looking up to Please, join me in the fight to ban size zero models from the catwalk and to instill that all models should have a healthy BMI. Please add your name and send this on.