This is the reality. Popular media (television, movies, magazines, etc.) have, since World War II, increasingly held up a thinner and thinner body image as the ideal for women.
In recent survey by Teen People magazine, 27% of the girls felt that the media pressures them to have a perfect body.
Many women suffer from body dissatisfaction, and assiduous dieting and the relentless pursuit of thinness has become a normative behavior among women in Western society (Rodin, Silberstein & Striegel-Moore,1984).
Thinness has not only come to represent attractiveness, but also has come to symbolize success, self-control and higher socioeconomic status. Marketdata Enterprises, Inc. estimated the size of the weight loss industry for 1994 at $32,680 billion.