Nearly all clothes shops in Britain use size 10 or size 8 mannequins, including Topshop and Miss Selfridge, even though the average British woman is a size 16. (Halliday, 2013).

Asked whether the fixation on skinny thighs is a way of forcing women's bodies to look pre-pubescent, Franklin says: "This culture has encouraged women to infantilise themselves. When you are so fixated on approval for what you look like, you are a little girl: you haven't grown up." (Swash, 2013).

http://www.theguardian.com/lifeandstyle/2013/nov/03/thigh-gap-pressure-point-women-self-esteem

The advert sparked a debate over skin tone and education levels. Many believed the inference to be that darker-skinned students are less intelligent than their lighter-skinned colleagues in a country where fairer skin has long been equated with higher class – as a whiter complexion suggests a life not spent toiling on a farm. (Hodal, 2013b).

She doesn't think about food all the time now, but says you never really escape the mindset. She channels the behaviour that once fuelled her eating disorder into healthier pursuits – especially trying to work out what it was all about, through her novel.

What that means, explains Katie, is that she worked on it compulsively, pushing herself to get the hundreds of illustrations finished for the deadline, and obsessing about it for three years. Interestingly, the fruit of her labours is a whacking 504 pages long – it can't be by chance that this story of how a person almost wasted away to nothing is one of the heaviest books you're ever likely to read. The physical lightness of an anorexic body sits in stark contrast to the emotional weight that invariably surrounds it – although Katie seems unsure about whether the condition is caused by external or internal forces. (Moorhead, 2013b).

The fact that men are feeling increasingly insecure about their physical appearance is borne out by a number of studies. Last year, for example, the YMCA revealed that 38% of men questioned said that they would sacrifice a year of their life if it meant that they could have the perfect body. (Cosslett, 2013c).

But now the film star Nandita Das has taken a stance against the craze and given her support to the Dark is Beautiful campaign which challenges the belief that success and beauty are determined by skin colour. "I want people to be comfortable in their own skin and realise that there is more to life than skin colour," she says, adding that an Indian paper had written "about my support for the campaign and then lightened the photo of me that went alongside it". (Rajesh, 2013). 

Looking at a beautiful, thin woman is unlikely to make most people feel better, because it encourages you to compare your hopeless self with her. It does not tackle what is so often the underlying cause of obesity – unhappiness. That extra biscuit or four to make the day just that bit brighter. The inertia following the late-night binge. The cycle of guilt and chips and hopelessness and envy. The void that wants filling. (Cosslett, 2013a).

I see clear parallels between fatness and thinness. I believe that out-of-control eating may work in the same way as out-of-control starving, as a defence mechanism against the world, a place to retreat when it all gets too much.

The plus-size sisterhood can be frightening. Among the messages I received (only from women, and mostly anonymous) I was called a skinny bitch, a body fascist, and a fat-nazi. I was informed that men "love something to grab on to", and that "curves" are sexier than skeletons. (Woolf, 2013).

since pheromones that are secreted to play a role in sexual attraction may be held in body hair, biologically, women with more pubic hair are sexier. (Pamela Stephenson, 2013).

"Fitting back into pre-pregnancy jeans is not the priority after childbirth." (Swinson in Jones, 2013).