Body Image // Current

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2 days ago

An offhanded remark from husband prompts wife to spend £30,000 on surgery

This nutcase of a women has spent £30,000 - and plans to spend more - on liposuction and other plastic surgery after her... more

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5 days ago

Whats Wrong With You? Nothing!

Being a woman in today’s society is not easy, as the concept of what is considered “attractive” has dramatically changed over the years. I have a unique perspective on this because I work for a bathing suit company. Women would tell me everything that they didn’t like about their bodies. They were too fat or too thin. They didn’t like their stomach or their hips or their legs, and all day long, I would try to convince them that it didn’t matter what they looked like as long as they were confident they could carry any look off. These were smart, funny, original women who didn’t think of themselves as beautiful because they were not supermodels.

Until one day I was speaking to one particular customer from New York. She needed a bikini in one of the larger sizes we made, so I stated my usual line of response “If you want you can cut the tags out and nobody will know what size it is but you.” Most women found this line of reasoning comforting. This woman did not. “Honey” she said “I love myself body size, bullet holes and all, and if someone doesn’t think I am beautiful than they can look the other way!” I was shocked! Someone who was comfortable with who they were. Was I dreaming? It made me so sad that out of the hundreds of calls I received only one person had told me she liked herself! It made me wonder, what is beautiful? Is it a flat stomach and skinny thighs? Well, there are a lot of women with those attributes and it still isn’t good enough for them. I realized that beautiful is not a waist size, beautiful is an attitude. We are all beautiful in our own way, it is us that fails to see it.

Two years ago I lost seventy pounds through diet and exercise. I always thought if I was a size ten instead of a size twenty-four my life would be perfect and all my problems would melt away. Skinny girls have all the fun, right? How wrong I was! Even though I was thinner my problems were still there, so instead of focusing on how I looked in that little black dress I started to focus on how I looked to myself. I looked myself in the mirror every day and told myself, “You are beautiful,” and one day I started to believe it! It was then that those problems started to melt away.

From the executive to the housewife, all women have the same issues, and it makes me wonder … if we as women stopped obsessing about those “last five pounds” and instead focused that energy on something positive, what good we could accomplish! It is our differences that make us unique, and we are all in our own way beautiful. Beauty radiates from the inside out! When I get down on myself, I volunteer for a local cause or donate to charity because I know that I am helping people, which make my insides beautiful. Outer beauty is fleeting, inner beauty lasts a lifetime. Sexy is not a particular body size, it is a state of mind. If you feel attractive, you are.Being a woman in today’s society is not easy, as the concept of what is considered “attractive” has dramatically... more

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7 days ago

Sip 'n starve: Dangerous diets in disguise

Leigh-Allyn Baker sits in a West Hollywood café, slowly stirring whipped cream into her Americano. A working actress with credits like “Will & Grace” and “My Name Is Earl” under her belt, the Kelly Ripa look-alike is six and a half months pregnant and highly conscious of the calories she’s about to consume. “Dieting is still always in the back of my mind,” Baker admits. “Really I wanted a latte, but it had too many empty calories.”

During the 14 years she has worked in Hollywood, the 35-year-old has endured constant pressure to be movie-star slim. At one audition that called for a woman who felt comfortable being on screen in a bathing suit, a casting director scoffed at the sight of the 5-foot-2-inch, 110-pound actress in her bikini, rolled her eyes and said, “You think you’re thin?”

“If you’re an actress, you’re always on one diet or another — it’s a way of life,” Baker says, sighing. She has suffered through juice-only fasts such as the master cleanse, attempted a raw-food diet and other food-restriction plans, popped phentermine and Prozac and tried drastically slashing calories. When she got pregnant, Baker was elated that she could buy previously off-limit foods. “The first two things I was going to indulge in were a sweet potato and a banana, and I remember thinking, That’s really messed up — it’s a big extravagant hurrah to have a banana now?”
Welcome to Los Angeles, perhaps the only place on earth where a piece of fruit is, well, forbidden. Talk to your average Angeleno, and odds are you’ll hear a history like Baker’s, one riddled with a variety of extreme weight loss attempts: fasts and detoxes, pills and painfully restrictive menus. L.A. women live in the entertainment capital of the world, where beauty standards are unrealistically high and the ultimate compliment is “Omigod, you’re so tiny!”

“Most women here are at all times either on a diet, thinking about one, reading about one or hearing about one their friends are on,” says Kathy Kaehler, a fitness and food coach in L.A. who works with Julia Roberts and other celebrities. But there’s a hitch. Even in this city, if you go on too many diets, your friends will start to think that you’re vain, have an eating disorder or are just plain annoying. As a result, women here are — superficially, anyway — forswearing dieting and embracing a new euphemism for it: cleansing. Sure, you’re still expected to fit into those size 00 jeans, but instead of just being super skinny, now you’re supposed to be skinny and healthy.

The problem for the rest of us is that what happens in Los Angeles never stays in Los Angeles for long. For better or worse, any weight loss craze there will spread, inevitably, to the rest of the country, thanks to the blogs, TV shows, tabloids and tweets that obsessively monitor the bodies of Hollywood celebs. During one week this past January, for example, OK! and two other celebrity weeklies dedicated a total of 15 pages to the hottest Hollywood diet fads, including vegan, Izo Cleanze and master cleanse. When Anne Hathaway went on a 48-hour lemonade detox before the Golden Globes, the news was splashed across the pages of People. “That’s how the ripple effect across the country begins,” Kaehler says. “If someone out here is drinking lemon juice and dropping pounds, Lisa in Nebraska will hear about it and start drinking lemon juice.”

In reality, however, lemon juice is not a meal, and taken to extremes, cleansing is anything but healthy. Nor is it an effective way to drop pounds for good. To reach this contradictory healthy-skinny ideal, L.A. ladies have developed some disordered techniques that cross old-school self-starvation with New Age mind-body rhetoric. And these techniques will probably land in your town soon — if they haven’t already.Leigh-Allyn Baker sits in a West Hollywood café, slowly stirring whipped cream into her Americano. A working actress with... more

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16 days ago

‘Phantom fat’ can linger after weight loss

Even though Kellylyn Hicks has lost about 85 pounds over the last year and a half, and gone from a size 24 to a tiny size 4, she... more

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18 days ago

Nipple Surgery - the new nip and tuck

Call it the Victoria Beckham effect? London's Harley Medical Group has reported an astonishing 30 per cent rise in nipple surgery over the last 12 months.

Not only that, but a spokesperson for Bosomfriends.co.uk, a website dedicated to nipples prostheses announced they had recorded a “significant increase” in the sale of prosthetic nipples in the past year.

So what's going on? Victoria Beckham's recent pert appearance in a transparent black t-shirt ignited fresh speculation over whether her nipples are real or fake and it seems she might have launched a new trend.

'Until now celebrities didn't expose their nipples so they were no "nipple role models",' explains Dr Riccardo Frati, a cosmetic surgeon for the Harley Medical Group.

As shocking as it sounds, nipple surgery is becoming more accessible. 'Until recently, women didn't know they could alter the shape, colour and size of their nipples,' explains Dr Frati.

Nipple surgery - which can cost anything up to £2,000 if done privately - is an umbrella term for a wide spectrum of treatments. Nipple lifts involve creating several small flaps of skin around the actual nipple which will then push it up and out.

Asymmetrical nipples can be evened out and even the areola (the pigmented area around the nipple), can be tattooed if you are not happy with your nipple colour.

One of the most common procedures is the correction of inverted nipples - when the nipple is flat or concave and refuses to protrude or become erect on it's own. The condition can interfere with breastfeeding and is thought to affect around 1.5 million women in the UK.

Although to date the majority of nipple procedures are performed on post-mastectomy patients, cosmetic surgeons such as Dr Frati are seeing more and more women who simply want the operation for aesthetic reasons.

As with any surgery, there are risks involved and any woman considering such a procedure should consider all her options, even false silicone nipples, which at a cost of less than £5, are a lot cheaper - and a lot less shocking - than going under the knife.Call it the Victoria Beckham effect? London's Harley Medical Group has reported an astonishing 30 per cent rise in nipple... more