Women take note! Curvy bodies are back! Straight and thin bodies are
out. When it comes to women, we have always defined a beautiful body in
terms of how close it is to an hourglass shape. Read one of our earlier
articles entitled
The Beautiful Body (Part 2) – How Science Defines a Beautiful Body for Women.
The
results of a British survey published very recently now confirms that
65% of British women want hourglass shaped bodies rather than skinny
and straight bodies.The hourglass body shapes were “in”
during the 60s and were flaunted by stars like Marilyn Monroe.
Subsequently, the hourglass body shapes were “out” and the
straight/skinny bodies as paraded by models like Twiggy were “in”. A
lot of the hype of the shapeless bodies of models in the 80s and 90s
was propagated by the mass media, the advertising and the fashion
industries. As the saying goes, if a lie is repeated enough times,
people start believing it to be the truth. This fueled the massive
interest in the “size zero” culture. Believe it or not, this has
resulted in women dieting and starving themselves to fit a certain
clothing size. Women always had pride in saying, “I am a size 10? or ”
I am a size zero”.
Laura Bryant from the Kellogg company
that carried out the survey was quoted as saying: “The report shows
that women’s attitudes to slimming over the last 50 years have changed
along with their figures. It seems British women have lost their waists
but now they are demanding it back. They are more concerned about
getting a curvy hourglass shape like their grandmothers instead of
being the perfect size 10. This shows a marked shift in attitude from
the 80’s and 90’s. Back then, success and failure of any slimming
effort was benchmarked against fitting into certain sized clothes”.
British women want a body like that of Nigella Lawson.
Timeless beauties for ages had very shapely and curvy bodies.
Believe it or not, even the Venus de Milo was sculpted with an
hourglass shape! Incidentally, the Venus de Milo was sculpted some time
between 130 and 100 BC and is believed to depict the Greek goddess of
love and beauty.
The problem has always been the weight
scales. Women were sold on the idea that the only attractive body was a
“size 10? or a “size zero”. Some women were built with bigger frames
and could not possibly fit into a “size 10? or a “size 0?. What did
they do? They starved and dieted to shrink their bodies to fit the
mould. The act of starving one’s self to fit a certain dress size is no
different from the ancient Chinese act of “foot binding”. The weight scales were used as a means of measuring this shrinkage.
The problem with the weight scales is
that it can’t measure how shapely your body is. For a more detailed
understanding of this, please refer our earlier article entitled The Beautiful Body (Part 2) – Weight Scales and BMI Can’t Measure a Beautiful Body.
The
Waist to Hip Ratio (WHR) is used to measure the extent of the hourglass
shape of a woman’s body. A WHR of 0.7 is considered as perfection. Read
The The Beautiful Body (Part 2) – How Science Defines a Beautiful Body for Women for a more detailed description on this subject. As mentioned in that article, women like Audrey Hepburn, Marilyn Monroe, Sophia Loren, Jessica Alba, Salma Hayek and Catherine Zeta Jones, have a WHR close to 0.7. This includes the Venus de Milo!
A woman still needs to lose weight to
attain an hourglass shape but it must be Correct Weight Loss. This is
weight loss that moves a woman closer to the WHR of 0.7. It requires
losing fat while toning and shaping the muscles. the conventional way
of just dropping digits on the weight scales won’t do anymore!
What are the views and thoughts of the women out there about what a beautiful body should look like. What do men find appealing?
Since this article has been hugely
popular, we want to start getting feedback from the readers in the poll
below. (Poll opened on 19th August 2009). We will publish the results
once the polls are closed.
By Paramjit Sidhu for Correct Weight Loss