February 2010: Mirror, Mirror, On the Wall, Who is the Thinnest of Them All?

Browse through any magazine or watch most tv shows and it's hard to imagine that prestige, happiness, love and success are not directly linked to how much you weigh. The overwhelming presence of unachievable, unrealistic body shapes and sizes can wreak havoc on our self-image.But you know that. What you might not know is that...Women's magazines contain 10.5 times more articles related to dieting and weight loss than men's magazines and teenage girls rate magazines as the number one source of information regarding diet and health.

The primary reason presented by adolescent girls for following a nutrition or fitness plan was to lose weight and become more attractive, not be stronger and healthier.

Sixty nine percent of female television characters are thin, only 5% are overweight.

A study of Stanford undergraduates revealed 68% felt worse about their own looks after reading woman's magazines.

Another study concluded that when girls 14-18 were exposed to images of both typical models and computer altered images of overweight models, they judged their own appearance much more negatively after exposure to the thin images. The results also showed that the thin ideal produced feelings of depression, shame, guilt, body dissatisfaction, and stress.

The average size of the idealised woman, as portrayed by models, has become increasingly thinner, stabilizing at 13-19% below physically expected weight.

Smoking is a common method of weight loss, leading for the first time in history to girls smoking more than boys.

So the next time you thumb through a magazine and sigh about why you can't look more like whoever it is you're envying at the moment, remember, you live in the real world...she doesn't. Focus on the qualities you admire in real women.