About three weeks ago, my friend BBM'd me about a story in Glamour pertaining to Jessica Beil. The article, among other achievements, celebrates Biel's athletic physic and goes into some detail as to how she maintains it. My remarkable clever friends writes, "A policy of not eating (and I quote directly) 'bread, dairy, sugar, salt and not a lot of meat' is a miserable and dangerous one, which ought not to be published in even a vaguely commendable light". Of course she is right. Ms Biel, for all her admirable self-control around all yummy-tasting foods, is recommending that a good body comes at the price of a healthy diet. Of course, dieting is about denying ourselves certain things, but it is NOT about depriving oneself of several major food groups. My MENSA-brained friend closes with the cutting, and kick-ass, remarks: "Your front cover promises details of how Jessica gets her 'killer' bod; I wish at the very least that these extreme measures had been covered in a way that showed Glamour's aspirational readers that some things come at too high a cost". Some things come at TOO high a cost.
Today, Jezebel proved that sometimes the cost aren't worth a thing. Glamour published photographs of Jessica wherein the airbrushing was unfinished.
If anything were to drive home the point that there is no such thing as bodily perfection (well, not without some state-of-the-art software, and a steady hand), and that any attempt to be Jessica Biel doesn't actually get the body you see in Glamour, it is this image. While Glamour preaches about Jess' "killer" bod, the photo editors are busy at work, tinkering with the very body we are all supposed to want. It opened my eyes to the hypocrisy of 'glossy mags' even more than ever. Don't get me wrong, I still love them (that is my very own hypocricy), but in my minds eye I will try extremely hard to seperate the reality from the fiction, i.e. what is achievable through diet and exercise, and what is achievable only with the help of a MacBook.
In other news, I recently took up yoga and it is make me love my body in ways I never have before (even though my body is pleading with me to stop the torture!). THAT is the feeling we should all strive for in the healthiest possible way - not the unobtainable dream of Jessica Biel's body, especially when Ms Biel herself isn't even seeing that in the mirror...
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