by Jaime Lafond

Created on: July 14, 2009

When you look in the mirror, what do you see? Body image is your perception of how your body looks in the mirror. A person with a healthy body image will see a true reflection of themselves in a positive light; while a person with an unhealthy body image will see a distorted version of themselves staring back. There are many factors that negatively affect a person's body image including, but not limited to, societal pressures to achieve ideal body weight and conflicting messages from professionals in the health and fitness industries.

Among those people who exhibit signs of a distorted body image, a positive correlation between weight and body image is often reported. That is, as the number on the scale increases, the magnitude of a person's distorted body image also increases (and vice versa). This trend is significantly influenced by our cultural obsession with extreme and unrealistic slimness.

Unfortunately, the emphasis of the message you can never be thin enough by the media, family, and peers is so compelling that our society has come to accept extreme thinness as the ideal body. The acceptance of this unrealistic ideal has perpetuated an escalation in fad dieting, surgical fat removal, eating disorders, and an array of psychological issues (e.g., a research study found that 3 minutes spent looking at models in a fashion magazine caused 70% of women to feel depressed, guilty, and shameful).

To complicate the issue further, our society is bombarded with confusing and conflicting messages from health and fitness professionals in regards to healthy or ideal weight which result in misunderstandings and, consequently, distorted body image. In 1998, the National Institutes of Health adopted the body mass index (BMI), a calculation based on height and weight, as a method of classifying body weight as healthy or risky weights. BMI is accepted worldwide and is commonly used by physicians and fitness professionals due to its efficiency and simplicity. Unfortunately, BMI has limitations it does not take into account muscle mass, body fatness, age, or bone structure so its value as an accurate means of body weight classification as it pertains to health is reduced (e.g., since muscle weighs more than fat, a woman who is fit and muscular may be classified as overweight or obese if BMI is used).

Let's try to put this into perspective: Society's ideal body is extremely thin and this contributes to both unhealthy behaviors and psychological issues that are

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