When Rubens was painting, voluptuous women were considered beautiful. Attractiveness stereotypes have been with us for centuries, but the particular ideal changes with fashion. The current beauty ideal is unrealistically thin. Using younger and younger models, with immature body shapes, demonstrates how unrealistic it is. And as the beauty ideal gets thinner, real women have been getting bigger. So the difference between ideal and actual just keeps growing.

In times of famine, people tend to get thin. When food is freely available, people get fat. We in the Western world have easy access to plentiful supplies of the widest range of palatable foods at very low prices. Thus the social pressure to achieve unrealistically thin bodies is even harder because at the same time we are receiving messages to eat. Particularly messages to eat for fun.

To help you maintain a healthy body image in a healthy body, try hypnosis.

In part, it is social pressure coming at us through the media, because even people with a healthy bodyweight want to lose weight.

The charity, Eating Disorder Association, has linked up with Dove, who do the commercials with women of all shapes and sizes, to promote understanding of how the media affects our body image and our self esteem through Body Talk. It is primarily targeted at young people, but there is good material that we can all benefit from.

We all need to understand this, as a negative body image and low self-esteem really does affect our lives deeply.