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..... Body image is a hot topic these days. Pick up any magazine and you will find pages upon pages of beautiful people sporting perfect smiles, flawless complexions and bodies that look like they have never been introduced to chocolate or ice cream. Poor things! Most of these people are not representative of the general population. While some may have a genetic predisposition to society’s ... of their learning process and much of the information they take in is subconsciously assimilated into their belief system. They hear Mom always complaining about her weight or hear Dad comment on his love handles and they learn to look for their own perceived flaws. A combination of media images paired with parental influences may damage a young child’s perception of a healthy body
measure of beauty, others spend plenty of money and work hard for their outer image. Many use cosmetic surgery to enhance their perceived shortcomings, others live a lifestyle of dieting and denial to please an agent or editor and when all that just isn’t enough, we have the magic of Photoshop to take it to a whole new level of skewed reality. The media constantly reinforces a body image that is not healthy for most of the general population.
..... It wasn’t enough that back in Twiggy’s day that the ideal womanly figure shifted from the curvaceous pin up appeal of Marilyn Monroe to a more androgynous figure that only about 4% of the population can actually achieve through natural genetics. In my opinion, this was a
image. We need to teach our youth how to appreciate and value their bodies by adopting and modelling our own healthy patterns.
..... We have become a nation obsessed with outward beauty and marketing agencies play on this for profit. Walk into any supermarket and you will likely see more than one whole aisle dedicated to making us either look better, feel better or smell better. The rest of the inner aisles are filled with many processed food products that undermine our health.
..... We are what we eat and our outward natural beauty is greatly influenced by what we put into our bodies. Clear eyes and a healthy glowing complexion are a reflection of our internal environment. Dry skin,
turning point for our society. Beautiful healthy women with lovely figures started trying to starve themselves into submission using diet pills, unhealthy crash diets and obsessive exercise regimes. The gaunt figure of the fashion industry run way model is an unrealistic image that subtly influences our measure of outward beauty and for the majority of us who don’t measure up, this can fuel feelings of low self-esteem and inferiority.
..... Men are not immune from striving for the perfect body either. Billboards that feature a young man with washboard abs and high definition muscles advertising underwear does not help. Media has also shaped our expectations of what the ideal man looks like and it is far different from our movie heroes from long ago. Over the past decade there has been a dramatic increase in the amount of money that men are spending on hair transplants, cosmetics, gym memberships and aesthetic surgery to enhance their appearances.
What is the message we are modelling for our youth? More and more young children are expressing dissatisfaction with their body image than ever before. Children are literally sponges that soak up their environment. It is part 		... accelerated aging, and poor skin tone are often the by-products of inadequate nutrition and dehydration. Processed and refined foods greatly imbalance the bodies’ natural internal balance, this affects our weight, energy levels and state of physical and emotional well-being. An optimal diet is built from using a wide variety of wholesome natural foods, the ones that live in the perimeter of the supermarket. These foods are the cornerstones for building sound vibrant bodies. In reality, the more we nurture our internal environments, the fewer products we need to enhance our external appearance.
..... Come into a relationship with the body that you were granted at birth. It is an intricately orchestrated miraculous machine that we rarely give enough thanks to for all the wonderful things it does without question. Why is it we tend to focus on what we don’t have more than what we do have? Show respect by adopting a healthy lifestyle, eat vibrant foods in moderation and weed out the bad habits that undermine your health. When you look in the mirror, the image that is looking back is looking for love and acceptance. Be who you are and be happy!
.....Good health to You!