i have wondered how much of our body image is a social construct? The ever persistent nurture or nature question? i did find this article
https://www.rehabs.com/explore/womens-body-image-and-bmi/
As a healthcare provider who has loaded up on education about diet and how it affects health, i've become progressively angry and upset at the 'food' industry in the US. i see the 'food' industry as similar to the tobacco industry during the mid twentieth century. We are constantly barraged with media pushing and manipulating us to eat manufactured 'food' that our bodies are not adapted to and the results are a sick society. Though size can be a marker of health, it can also be deceptive.
As a critical care nurse, easily 85% of the very ill people i care for are suffering from diseases totally related to what we eat. i'm angered that the focus is on appearance and not on the core root of our health crises: the food industry systematically and consciously addicts us to manufactured substances that they label as "food," but is really slow acting poison.
For example, high fructose corn syrup did not exist before the 70's, it had not even been 'invented.' Imagine, an "invented" substance, and it is so pervasive in our 'food' that it's hard to avoid unless one is an informed and conscious buyer. It's a more intensively sweet form of (cheap) sugar. Sugar is addictive and lights up the same areas of our brains as cocain does.
The list of additives to our food is endless.
Much of the stuff we eat, and generally have been raised to consider "food" without even thinking about it, didn't even exist 150 years ago. Read the label. We take little tiny pills with micro grams or mili grams of a chemical in them, and it has a profound effect on our body. We have to have a prescription and a professionals guidance to ingest it. But we think nothing of putting unnaturally added ingredients into our bodies several times a day, thinking of it as "food." Our bodies are simply not adapted to excessive additives, and we eventually reap the consequences of it with ill health.
Heart disease is the number one killer in the US, and most of it is 100% preventable, it's primarily a 'food' related disease. So is type two diabetes. Most of my patients look at me in shock when i inform them it's generally a reversible condition.
As a society we need to stop spending so much of our focus looking at, and being distracted by, appearance and consider what makes us healthy or unhealthy.