About the Girls
The Food Programme
BBC
4.4 • 976 Ratings
🗓️ 17 April 2026
⏱️ 43 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
Sheila Dillon discusses the rise of eating disorders among young women as part of Radio 4’s “About the Girls” series, which is hearing from teens across the UK about life in 2026.
As the number of young girls suffering from eating disorders increases in the UK, Sheila Dillon hosts a discussion about what's causing the rise, and what can be done to improve treatment outcomes.
Details of help and support with eating disorders are available at BBC Action Line
Produced by Natalie Donovan for BBC Audio in Bristol
Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | BBC Sounds, Music, radio, podcasts. |
| 0:07.4 | I'm Dilley Carter and I love organising. |
| 0:11.6 | In my brand new podcast, sort your life out, unpacked, celebrity guests join me to unbox three revealing items from their home. |
| 0:18.7 | Oh, wow. I wasn't expecting this. Along the way, |
| 0:22.5 | I'll be giving you practical hacks to help you declutter your life as well. This is the tough |
| 0:26.8 | love I need. Don't hold back. I'm definitely tucking you with me back to my house. Sort your life out, |
| 0:32.6 | unpacked. Watch on eye player, listen on BBC Sounds. |
| 0:47.0 | Over the coming week on Radio 4, we'll be hearing teenage girls discussing their lives in 2026. |
| 0:56.6 | It's the work of reporter Catherine Carr, who's talked to more than 150 girls for her new Radio 4 series about the girls. |
| 1:02.1 | Running through those conversations are the expectations placed on girls today, |
| 1:10.0 | to be beautiful, thin, successful, confident, vibrant. Expectations on a scale new to human history, |
| 1:12.5 | driven by screens everywhere. |
| 1:18.7 | It's hard to grasp what this is doing to girls, except I have an eight-year-old granddaughter, |
| 1:25.2 | and I fear for her. Because those expectations, those pressures reach into every corner of their daily lives and into their bodies, into what they eat. |
| 1:29.0 | Something, it seems, has gone awry in the relationship many young girls have with food, |
| 1:34.4 | all resulting, is that the word, in a month-by-month rise in eating disorders, mostly amongst young girls. |
| 1:43.0 | But before we look for some answers, let's talk to Catherine Carr, the reporter behind that series about the girls. |
| 1:50.4 | Catherine, food wasn't a central theme for you, but it did come up, especially around body image, didn't it? |
| 1:58.0 | Yes, it did. And I didn't really set out to ask about it specifically, |
| 2:02.4 | but again and again, girls mentioned it often quite casually, mainly to do with what their |
| 2:07.4 | bodies should look like. So here's one girl I spoke to describing the body ideal that she |
| 2:12.9 | feels is everywhere. You've got to have that hourglass figure realistically, don't you? You've got to be |
... |
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