“Girls reported magazines as their primary source of information regarding diet and health.”
Unfortunately, magazines are an excessively unfair representation of the actual female body. Airbrushed, reshaped, and digitally reduced, there’s nothing but unrealistic expectation left for the readers.
Here’s the results:
“A majority of girls in a 1999 study (59 percent) reported dissatisfaction with their body shape, and 66 percent expressed a desire to lose weight. Only 29 percent of the girls were overweight.”
“At age thirteen, 53% of American girls are “unhappy with their bodies.” This grows to 78% by the time girls reach seventeen.”
An airbrushed picture has lost of the beauty of its reality. It shows no facial lines of emotion, no scars of surviving, no meals enjoyed, no children born. It reveals no stories or strength.
Enjoy the reality of your body, or in the far more eloquent words of John Keats: