I recently came across an article from Jennifer Love Hewitt talking about the Hollywood hype for the acceptable female body (dare I say it goes way beyond Hollywood).

It appears that the "ultimate" female body type is only really obtainable for about a decade of life; sometime from mid to late teens through the twenties.

With such a focus on body image are females at a disadvantage during this stage of development? And are we setting up 30+ females for depression and an unachievable goal of rekindling the image as they reach their 30's, 40's and beyond.

If the above is true, what can be done to help our daughters (in my case), or sisters, wives and friends to overcome this constant media bombardment and an obsession to achieve an often unobtainable body type?

I think we should stop calling it unobtainable. It sends the wrong message about the obesity epidemic.

Dear Corri,

Why focus on the female body? My parents and grandmother always told me that I was special. When people told my parents, "What a beauty you've got." My father would remind me, "It's what's inside you that matters." And I tried very hard to be beautiful on the inside.

"Educate your mind, your inner beauty will shine," dad used to repeat often. And I did my best. Education was the focus in our family.
And instead of thinking about my looks I loved learning new things and I had the knack of learning languages quickly.

Perhaps if girls had a variety of interests and were kept busy, their body image would not be such a major concern. I did ballet, and Russian dancing, and played tennis...

Thanks Foxy ... and you're spot on. Beauty does come from inside, but it's often not until you find a level of self trust can you understand that (and sadly few achieve that during their teens).

Freediver - I certainly don't want to downplay the issue of obesity - this is equally as dire as the anorexic image at the other end of the spectrum.

Equally? I think it outweighs anorexia etc by a huge factor. It is overtaking cancer as the biggest killer ever, and it is almost entirely self inflicted. All this crap about you can't control what your body does, and we wonder why people are eating themselves to death. It's time for the self delusion to end.

Well, as usual, Foxy is shiny with commonsense.

When I was a kid, I was tall and pale - you couldn't get much uglier at my school, were the popular girls were petite and bronzed. Then I left school, and suddenly I was a sought after - for the very same reasons that I was shunned in Year 9.

Tell your daughter that life is long, beauty is fleeting, a love of good books will reward well into the doddering years and love is way more intense when it's not just about boobs. Tell her the best men like pretty girls, but they marry women who are brainy, funny and artistic, and, above all, secure and happy. Teach her that flirting is not about being hot, it's about the gorgeous playfulness of teasing and taunting someone who intrigues you. Teach her to love the creativity of fashion rather than becoming a slave to it.

And Foxy is right. Physical activity - particularly graceful physical activity - can encourage a girl to feel the beauty in her body even when it doesn't conform to the Cleopolitan ideal.

And tell she's amazing. All the time. I remember getting so angry when my mother told me I was beautiful, when I was absolutely convinced I was hideous. But now I know my healthy self esteem is based on her dogged insistence.