story of a girl

    Battle of the bulge- known as a famous battle during World War II as well as the battle each insecure, weight-conscious person faces every day.  The pressure to be thin in today's society is omnipresent.  It's all over the news, making the covers of magazines, and glorified in billboards we see everyday in Times Square.  When Lindsay Lohan began losing weight she started to shock the public when she became deemed "Surprisingly Thin" on the cover of US Weekly magazine.  But when have we made the distinction of how thin is too thin? Have we as a culture taken our obsession with weight and beauty too far?

    Well let's look a little deeper into this cultural epidemic.  Where does all of this pressure stem from?  Well, for starters, we are surrounded by pretty faces and thin bodies in magazines and fashion ads.  Skinny is beautiful.  But have we all fallen into this stigma that equates super thin bodies with beauty?  For example, I see girls all the time who read Vogue magazine cover to cover and glorify the models that grace each glossy page.  I've looked at all of the girls in those magazines with envy, but I think all girls go through that phase where they wish they could have the "perfect" body, whatever that means.  With Gisele as the center of the publics attention, as the "It-est it girl" in the fashion world , I began to think, is Gisele really happy?  Are models in general happy with their lifestyle?  Most of them don't eat and deprive themselves.  Most of them have eating disorders which in any circumstance are not worth the payoff of being a model, specifically the wealth one may accumulate.  Eating disorders and depravity are not on my top 10 list of a glamorous lifestyle.  So why do we idolize them?  Why has society glorified the skinny girl as the ideal body type?  During the Renaissance, bigger girls were considered beautiful, and were chosen as the subject of many famous painting still around today.  If we look at the Renaissance as a period of rebirth, then why can't we as a culture have our own renaissance?  They do say that history has a tendency to repeat itself.