I got to thinking today, after yesterday’s That’s Life magazine release, how our perception of acceptable body image has been so incredibly distorted by the media. It’s estimated we see up to 5,000 messages a day, many in the form of advertising containing slim, trim and athletic bodies. For women it’s even worse as we are bombarded with thousands of images of ‘socially acceptably shaped’ women in magazines, newspapers and on TV advertising everything from feminine hygiene to motor-sports. Most of them have been edited, retouched and air brushed. Few are real. And those that are, are the minority.

Constantly surrounded by this reinforcement of what we should look like many women tend get depressed by their looks and their weight. It doesn’t matter whether you are carrying around and extra 5 or 50 kg, at some point we all feel a sense of failure and inadequacy when compared to socienty’s idea of perfection. That sure is a lot of baggage for us to carry around. It affects our mood and it sometimes drives us to eat too much, sometime to drink too much and sometimes to the gym where we then feel even more of a failure compare with to the size 6 anorexic (but still unhappy) babe running at 12kph on the treadmill next to us. So how did we get caught up in believing that those perfectly air brushed waifs are what we are meant to look like, and that they are … perfect?

In 2006 the Dove “Evolution” Campaign for Real Beauty took one giant leap forward in helping women learn to accept and love their curves. It shows, in time lapse, a very normal woman being primped and made over physically, then digitally altered into someone’s idea of publicly acceptable beauty. It’s still one of my favourite YouTube videos and if you haven’t seen it then I highly recommend you take a look. Whilst watching it you will soon realise that you too can look like a model with the right make up, hair and Photoshop programmer. And whilst media can try and even succeed at distorting our idea of beauty on a superficial level, what it lacks is the human to human connection, and this is where our inner beauty always shines through, no matter how we look on the outside.