You can watch television commercials and see yourself on every advertisement. See how everyone exists on this planet with a size 2 body and men with more muscles than a cartoon of Superman. The perfect body can be had easily by drinking, taking, or buying whatever is promoted on television.

How many commercials will you watch in an average evening before you see someone with an average body? With the exception of the before pictures on the myriad rapid weight loss promotional commercials, you will be hard pressed to see anything closely resembling the reality 97% of the world knows as reality.

Have you ever seen anyone on a beer commercial with and extra pounds weighing them down? Of course not, every woman in the scenes of the bar looks like she would after two dozen mugs when anything that moves could be the love of your life. You never see the before and after pictures of the people that consume so much alcohol that they have a Michelin man shape to them.

Look at the women on the Victoria's Secret commercial. As a man, I must be honest that this display of such fine feminine specimens is special. But, realistically, VS will sell predominantly more of their garments in the L, XL and beyond range. The reason is because our eating habits have made advertising's reality squarely at odds with our reality.

The fronts of magazines tout the perfect body on every display rack you see. Do young girls recognize this as an anomaly or do they accept is as the expected norm and press themselves to attain a perfection that is a myth.

Anorexia and Bulimia show us the young women believe way too much of what is delivered to them over the media platforms. A favorite tact of the tabloids is to show those in the public spotlight that have allowed reality to overtake them and look like the majority who have unsightly bulges, pointing out that this is unacceptable for beautiful people.

Then three months later after the stars have radically changed their habits to quickly shed these unwanted pounds, the same tabloid will print more photos highlighting the sudden change as being too skinny for those that care about their well-being.

How can we determine what body image should be? It must be what we are comfortable with as we determine what our healthiest eating regimen can be. After all, how many of us could really stand to live on the diet of a Victoria Secret model?

Learn more about this author, Joe Owens.
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