Zero-ing on Size

How does our perception of the industry standard of the perfect body type lead to emotional insecurity and poor body image?

Recently scanning through the pages of the American magazine, ‘life and style’ the article of ‘Dieting To The Extreme’ caught my eye. Here popular celebrities such as Kate Middleton and Angelina Jolie, were shown looking highly emaciated as if pressurized to conform to standards that dictate beauty and fitness to remain popular and iconic. Is it not ironic that those in the enviable position of wealth and privilege, who can afford to eat in the worlds best five star Michelin acclaimed restaurants look as if they could do with a hearty meal. While those not so lucky in third world countries are lucky to sleep not hungry? One has a choice while the other does not. But this is not about the moral issues but on a knowledge point of view of what drives these women to the brink of starvation. And how their images praised and lauded has a domino effect on our perception of beauty and, how we react without reason emotionally to these conceived values.

I remember that my first image perception of the ideal woman was Barbie. And while I dressed her and combed her hair, I never stopped to question why she has an unreal, unobtainable body measurement that bordered on the ridiculous. I never realized that a fully grown post pubescent woman cannot have a 40” bust and a 18” waist!  It was the norm and acceptable and every little girl worth her salt wanted to grow up to be Barbie. In fact from as long as we can remember women wanted bodies out of the ordinary. Therefore, in the movie ‘Gone With The Wind’, we saw poor Scarlett O’Hara trying to tighten her corset to have a 16” waist so she could nab a husband at the ball. But is this not about conditioning and societies dictates that make us believe rather than actual facts and knowledge?

Today, in the fashion magazines we are bombarded with images which are airbrushed and photo shopped to perfection. And in fashion shows across the globe we applause at the stick thin figures with their pan caked faces and rouged cheeks in awe and admiration or at the six feet skinny mannequins on display in stores. ( However, we are shocked at the sight of starving bony Africans in their recent famine. What sort of warped standards are we setting?)  So egged and encouraged by these fashion images we try on the clothes only to realize that we fall far from expectations. We have failed while those we admire have not. So in an attempt to conform to ideals we starve and exercise to obtain approval.  We justify our actions on the belief that those in the know are right. We wrongly interpret media attention and focus on bodies as our core values and part of our culture and custom and tradition.  And we convince ourselves that there can be no other alternative or explanation that we must be thin.

The truth is we do not have actual factual knowledge. Weight is just a fad, a passing trend. Were not all those women in Raphael paintings bordering on the obese, and were they not considered beautiful in their time. Beauty is truly in the eye of the beholder, it is not a knowledge but simply a perception of the time. If we look at medical facts, anyone with a BMI of 20 is considered fit and healthy, and yet we choose to be below a BMI of 20 as we feel prettier.  We do not know pretty we feel pretty. We feel by our sensory perception when we should be knowing with our neural perception. We are given an yard stick of beauty by weight and we critically measure ourselves and others by this. But this is a falsely created number, unlike body temperature that is set at 98.4 and is knowledge based 30 23 30, size zero waif like proportions are not.

 Is it not time that we ignored these fallacies which are frivolous and promote poor esteem and body image and serious disease such as anorexia nervosa and bulimia. Supermodel Kate Moss to many epitomizes beauty, famously, said, “nothing tastes as good as skinny feels”. May be someone she never tucked into a cheeseburger or cheesecake to know how that tastes. And while we can debate on this issue forever, it certainly gives us food for thought!