Celebrities and Body Image

I love fashion, and I love looking at celebrity fashions. The problem with that is the gap between my weight reality, and that of Vogue and Hollywood. How can real people tell what healthy looks like?

The Project:

Use celebrity images to educate yourself about what a "healthy" weight looks like.

The Steps:

1. Create a Word document and make a table with headers of "Name," "Height," "Weight," "BMI," and "Images." Use this table to keep track of the next few steps.

2. Use the internet to find as many celebrities as you can that are within 1 inch of your own height (and a couple who have bodies that you envy regardless of their height).

Example: I am 5'3", so I looked for models and celebrities who are between 5'2" and 5'4".

3. Try to find an accurate weight for each of these celebrities.

4. Use a BMI calculator using this data to find the BMI of each celebrity. I used http://www.nhlbisupport.com/bmi/.

5. Then put the celebrities in order of BMI from lowest to highest.

Tip: I copied the table into Excel, clicked "sort" by BMI and then copied it back into Word.

6. Use the highlight feature in red on celebrities with a BMI under 18.5, and over 25.

7. Go online and find images of each of these celebrities. I tried to find bikini pictures so I could see their bodies clearly. Paste the images into your document so you can refer to them later.

This exercise will start to give you a clear image of what an unhealthy weight looks like, at least on the low side of the scale. Since I idealize celebrity bodies more than I should, it gave me a clear division between which people look healthy, and which people look anorexic.

Now I can look through Vogue and recognize that I will NEVER look like a fashion model; I don't even want to anymore. My body isn't built to be that skinny or gazelle-like. The clothes still look beautiful, but the bodies look under weight and unhealthy. I have a Word document with images of healthy figures that are actually my size. I can aspire towards a more realistic goal, instead of an unhealthy, impossible goal.

As promised, I am posting an image I created using My Virtual Model.

Weight-loss to date: down to 151lbs from 157lbs
Current BMI: 26.7