"Potato on stilts."
This was a nickname that started in elementary school and followed me through the first few years of high school. I had long skinny legs, and a bulky upper frame. During this time, I kept a plastic ring binder filled with ripped out magazine pages of models.
After school I would stare at them, hoping that their beauty their thinness would rub off on me, that I'd wake up the next morning resembling them. Instead, each glossy leaf stared back at me in disgust.
There was one especially bad day at school: my gym teacher was conducting evaluations on how well the class ran track. I was the only person who couldn't even make it around one lap without stopping.
With a gluttonous sorrow, I came home that afternoon and ate a whole bag of pretzels and half a jar of blue cheese, a quarter gallon of ice cream, and nibbles of any other treats in the cupboards.
And so it went: I ate because I was depressed, I was depressed because I ate.
I lost my pudge the summer after my first year at college. With the encouragement of an affluent, 30-year-old man I was dating (against my parents' continual disapproval of course), I starved myself down from 160 to 115 pounds in three months. When I finally came to my senses and broke up with him, my weight wobbled back up.
Because of these experiences, however, I still do not think of food in an entirely healthy way today.
Most of my female friends have had similar experiences growing up; half have or had some sort of eating disorder too: anorexia, bulimia, diet pills, laxatives...
Around 41 percent of American women are larger than a size 14. And yet about 65 percent of women have had an eating disorder at least once in their life.
So what's the cause?
My mother and father were very healthy influences in my life when it came to body image my mother, especially, always told me I was beautiful no matter what other classmates thought. But the glossy models told me differently.
It's no big shock that our cultural obsession with thinness has cleaved a nonsensical gap between body mass and attractiveness. Given that the qualities the opposite sex generally registers as attractive are, according to the evolutionary scientists, supposed to be some measure of health and fertility, this seems to demonstrate that we have rather lost our way as a culture.
In the past 10 years especially, there has been a large push to promote positive body images however. UK equalities minister Lynne Featherstone, for example, has been urging government for health warnings on airbrushed photographs that underline the fact that they have been digitally altered.
"I am very keen that children and young women should be informed about airbrushing, so they don't fall victim to looking at an image and thinking that anyone can have a 12 inch waist," she was quoted in a Sunday Times article last week.
In an attempt to promote body confidence, Featherstone has been working with advertising executives and magazine editors around the world to discuss how to stop promoting unrealistic body images.
She has even lauded Mad Men actress Joan Holloway played by Christina Hendricks as the new "real role model" for girls to aspire to.
Thinking back to my adolescent days and the continual subjugation to false images of extremely thin models and celebrities, I have to agree. Hendricks' famous curves have been the focus in the ideological war between real women and the fashion industries construct of one. I wonder how I would have thought of myself as a teenager if there were more photos of her in magazines.
All women have felt that pressure at least once in their life to conform to an unrealistic stereotype. It's not only an immediate harm, but also one that lasts a lifetime. Incorporating more diverse images of women in the entertainment industry is the first step to flipping the scales.
Sarah T. Schwab is a Sunday OBSERVER contributor. Send comments to editorial@observertoday.com or view her Web site at www.SarahTSchwab.com