Last week a distant 16-year-old female relation fresh out of her maths GCSE introduced herself and said, “You did that size zero programme, didn’t you?” Yes, I said, unsure of what was coming next. Since a documentary in which I explored the effects on my mind and body of sticking to some of the more ludicrous diets women subject themselves to in order to keep their body weight well below normal, I have got used to being accosted by women and girls fascinated by my experience.

The 16-year-old was exceptional in that she was angry. “Well, I think you’re really setting a bad example, because when I watched that programme, I thought I can do that, and . . .” she delved into her school bag and scuffled the pages of her diary. “See, it says, ‘ it starts here’,” she flicked the pages forward, indicating the insanely short period she had set to lose a stone or more in weight. “And then it was meant to end here” – she showed me a page that said, “ it ends!”

I was horrified that she had taken my own swift and irresponsible weight loss as inspiration, despite the fact that my experience had included an ensuing swift gain in weight and a period of bingeing and purging which, had it gone on, would have been considered by any doctor as full-blown bulimia.

Desperately repeating again and again to her that it was a dreadful experience, which left my eating habits in a mess for months afterwards, she said, “But I hate my body.” We talked some more, and in as many different ways as possible I said, “Eat normally, love yourself, and talk to someone about how you feel. And whatever you do, do not diet.”

Depressed that something meant to put women off diets merely encouraged more sad and negative behaviour, I wondered, where is this madness going to end? The truth is that girls such as this one – bright, pretty, feisty, funny and nowhere close to unhealthily big, but obsessed by their shape – are everywhere. We live in an age when women have more equality than ever, yet they pour hate and discontent onto their bodies as if it were body shape and not any other kind of achievement that defines our success as human beings.

It was observing the women and girls around her suffering from disordered eating that set Courtney Martin, a 27-year-old New York-based academic and writer, on the path to Perfect Girls, Starving Daughters (Piatkus) a roaming epic charting myriad ways in which women turn food on themselves like a loaded gun, with a frequency which stifles potential and befouls self-esteem.

Her study of women and their relationships with food and weight is being called third wave feminism’s answer to Susie Orbach’s seminal 1978 Fat Is a Feminist Issue. Martin’s book addresses every form disordered eating takes in a developed world, which turns millions into severe self-critics; be that the woman who occasionally crams pints of ice cream down her neck when she’s tired and under stress, even though she doesn’t really even like ice cream (that’s me); or the one who runs for hours on bones that can’t support a miserably malnourished frame.

One of Martin’s braver theories is that this state women find themselves in is a direct cause of feminism; indeed, she calls it feminism’s unintended legacy. “It’s the super-woman issue, we’ve gained equal opportunities, and we’re doing well, we may have a female [US] president soon. But with that comes this idea that we have to be everything: graceful, beautiful and thin.”

The title for the book, she thinks, “is an apt description of the way in which today’s girls feel compelled to chase after the dangerous delusion of perfection, all the while their ‘starving daughters’ – the innate and neglected wisdom of their bodies – scream ‘slow down!’ ” The mental health charity Mind estimates that in the UK as many as one woman in 20 have eating habits that give cause for concern. Most are aged 14 to 25. About one in 100 young girls are affected by eating disorders, with 6,000 new cases of anorexia nervosa diagnosed last year alone. Some 1.1m people in the UK are believed to suffer from an eating disorder, although the true number is not known as many go undiagnosed. More than 25% of people with anorexia become so weak that they require hospital treatment Eating Disorder Not Otherwise Specified (Ednos) is a medical term used when a patient clearly has disordered eating but does not meet diagnostic criteria for any one specific condition. Ednos is a condition that would appear on many women’s medical notes, were they to be open about some of their eating habits. “In the western world,” Martin says, “it is a difficult task to get back to the middle path of authentic hunger.” Her description of a typical girl’s daily battle makes sobering reading: “One minute debating whether to have a bagel and be “bad” or a protein shake and be “good”; two minutes chastising yourself for choosing the bagel; two minutes contemplating how fattening the cream cheese was . . .”

Speak to headmistresses at the country’s elite girls’ schools and all are aware of the fragility of their charge’s relationships with food. At certain top London girls’ schools, the anorexics eat at special tables. It’s an inescapable fact for young women today that food and body image are the big hurty sticks they use to beat themselves with.

Martin’s focus is largely her own generation, the teens to late twenties who contend with the schizophrenic media barrage of being told the fashion icons held up to them in the stick-like shape of Nicole Richie, Lindsay Lohan and the Olsen twins (all of whom have admitted at some time or another to having eating disorders) are unhealthy ones. Yet icons they are.

For many girls those images of glowing, honey-blonde, fashion-dandy, stick-thin hip-sters are compelling. At 37, I should know better, but even I found the picture of Richie, a woman who is unquestionably ill, used in another newspaper’s discussion of the issues in Martin’s book, frankly gorgeous.

If the mixed messages in the media are compelling to an old-timer like me, God only knows the effect they have on a teenager.

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