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Faced with a choice between Lindsey Lohan and Kate Winslet, I'd take Kate every time.

So why do I want to be thinner? Why have I never in my life been thin enough, despite always being inside the correct BMI range and fitting the supposed perfect U.K. size?

The current obsession with the stick-thin body without an ounce of fat will probably not last forever. It's an oft-wheeled out example that it used to be the voluptuous pre-Raphaelite figure that was held as the ideal, but it bears repeating.

If this is the case and our obsession with the perfect body image is purely cultural and imposed upon us by an irresponsible and out-of-control media then am I really so shallow as to fall for that? Those childhood and teenage years spent flicking through my mother's catalogues full of smiling 16-going-on-30 year old ninnies dressed in the latest god-awful fashions..has it all been so indelibly imprinted in my mind that I have lost grip on reality?

These are questions which have plagued me over the years. I am, by society's standards, intelligent....first academically and subsequently professionally successful. So why can I not come to terms with myself? I have sat for a solid twenty minutes trying to think of one girl or woman I know who has not expressed dissatisfaction with themselves. I cannot think of one.

I have taken the only sensible option available to me at the moment.."damage limitation", by which I mean absorbing myself in reality and refusing to become a victim of the fad-dieting (which can spiral all too quickly into an eating disorder) and latest-exercise-crazes that plague the Western world. So I applaud the Dove real women campaign, and I think Jamie Lee Curtis was fantastic for allowing herself to be photographed without airbrushing to show the world that, although she is very slim, she has lumps, bumps and cellulite like the rest of us.

I eat well and don't diet, and I have over the past two years built regular exercise of the best kind - walking, swimming, conditioning exercises - into my life. I am doing my best to forget the great grinning airbrushed airheads who beam their Hollywood white smiles at me from the magazine racks in the newsagent's (I feel that in today's climate "tabloidpimp" may be a more fitting description that "newsagent").

So in theory, I am on the path toward fitness. But sometimes it feels like a maze and there are many dead ends. I hope I can find my way home before nightfall.

Learn more about this author, Isobel Clayton.
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