Beauty, In the Eye of the Beholder?

Beauty, In the Eye of the Beholder?

So there you were, in another life, reclining on a chaise lounge being painted in all your voluptuousness by Botticelli.  Or perhaps you live in the South seas where special teams of adoring tribes people are employed to massage your enormous stomach as more and more food was forced into you to make you the fattest, and in that time and place, the most beautiful, matriarch.

Definitely times change and our idea of what we find attractive changes with them.  Kate Moss and Naomi Campbell would be laughed at or pitied in Botticelli’s time.

In the 19th Century being beautiful meant wearing a corset despite these instruments of torture causing breathing and digestive problems. Nowadays we try to diet and exercise ourselves into the acceptable shape of our time often with even more serious health consequences.

TV and advertising across the board shows  'beautiful people' all the time, and especially as Christmas ramps up the pressure for us to fit into that perfect Christmas outfit. In reality however, the current media ideal of thinness for women could only be achieved by around 5% of the female population!

Apart from this 5% most women are trying to achieve the impossible: standards of female beauty have, in fact, become more and more unrealistic during the 20th century. In 1916, the perfect woman was about 5ft 5in tall and weighed almost 10 stone. Over the past 25 years the gap between top models and beauty queens and us mere mortals has gone from a weight difference of 8% to around a whopping 24%. Some of us will already be thinking about the strict diets we will be going on in the New Year.  But before you start stocking up on cabbage for after Christmas this year, try visiting your doctor first.  He or she will have some very good pointers for you to make sure your efforts in the New Year bring the results you want. 

UK Health Radio – the health radio station for the United Kingdom, Europe and beyond at www.ukhealthradio.com – is kindly sponsored by www.1-stop-health-shop.com

Have a great Christmas!

Amanda Thomas

UK Health Radio