As someone who grew up with little television dramas and women magazines, I don’t base my ideal of beauty on the media standards but rather on
scientific research.
For this reason, I have never really asked anyone for assurance about my own body and weight. I don’t even think about whether I am fat, slim or skinny.
Personally, I find it both silly and sad when women idealize “skinny” as the perfect body shape and go to the extent of eating very little per meal to achieve this ideal body type, hoping they would be able to attract more guys.
There are even women my age who are not obese but pay exorbitant fees to slimming centres, just to become skinny.
Anyone who knows anything about beauty science and social psychology would tell you that the attempt to be thin won’t make you more attractive.
While going from fat to “just nice” is helpful… going from “just nice” to skinny just makes you unattractive to the opposite gender.
This is because men generally prefer curvy body shapes, not stick thin figures.
If you open men’s magazines, you will find that the type of models being used there are very different from the ones in female magazines. This is a very clear indicator that the type of ideal female beauty which appeals to women generally is different from those which appeal to men.
Curves are attractive to men because they signal – fertility and health. This has been supported by several studies:
Researchers at Georgia Gwinnett College and the University of Texas at Austin say that curvy women reward the male brains the same ways a drug does. Their study asked a group of men to look at photographs of women’s naked bodies before and after plastic surgery. None of the women lost weight. Instead their fat had been redistributed to other places.
Some essentially gained weight to become more curvy after surgery. MRI scans of the observers’ brains when they looked at curvy women showed activity in the same reward centers activated by pleasurable drugs.