As someone who grew up with body issues, I know all about it. I was on the other end of the spectrum as a scrawny underweight youngster no matter what I ate.

The reality was that most of my body issues didn't stem from advertising, it stemmed from people and that is the same issue you have with females. You can get plus sized models into every advert and it still won't change the perceptions within youth. That's like blaming violence on video games. Video games may desensitize people to violence, but it doesn't change the influence that the parents have on it.

As an example, in the interest in protecting people's feelings we now have one of the most obese nations in the world and one of the fastest growing obesity problems outside of the US. They are now comfortable about their bodies but they're obese. That does not solve the problem. It creates a whole new problem when they start dying at the age of thirty from heart disease, but hey, at least they are dying happy and comfortable about their bodies. The US has had to create new categories of obesity to cater for the changes.

For starters, we should be teaching us kids to be healthy, not thin. We should be teaching our kids that fat/thin has nothing to do with whether you are healthy, healthy has to do with diet and exercise, not diet pills or short cuts. And that's the part that most parents battle with because to do that, we actually have to lead by example and we've become a junk food culture that sits in front of the TV and our kids learn from their parents.


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