I know my numbers: BMI, Weight, Measurements, Calories and Kilojoules.

Women may be slightly influenced by the pictures we see in magazines, but we are not foolishly led to eating disorders by those images.

The issues we have with our bodies are based on a lifetime of hearing the opinions of those we love; our mothers, our friends, ourselves.

I still hear the words that are spoken so often, "I saw XXX the other day, you should see how old/fat/thin she looks." or "You should have seen what she was wearing!"

As a teenager I was naturally underweight and people thought that I had an eating disorder but at that time the idea of dieting was inconceivable to me. I didn't understand the other girls' obsessions with wanting to loose weight. At that time, I would look at them and wish that I could put on weight because I felt scrawny and unfeminine next to them.

I hit my mid twenties and put on weight. I was fine with the weight until I hit a very stressful situation in my life. Exercise was the only way that I could excise the frustration that I felt. It worked, it made me feel better and suddenly I started to view my body differently; an association was made. I felt that I should eat healthier, exercise ..... and that would put me in greater control of my life. I would be more in control of who I was.

From such benign beginnings, I developed a distorted image of my body.

Whether a person is fat or thin makes no difference when the mind distorts what the eye sees. A bad body image skews a person's perspective, some get excessive plastic surgery, most of us can't afford plastic surgery so we change what we can.

A bad body image leads to this obsession with numbers:
How much do I weigh today?
What is my BMI today?
How many calories are in that?
How many calories do I eat in a day?
Where can I cut down on calories?
How can I loose weight today?
How many calories have I eaten today?
How much to I weigh tonight?

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