· Contemporary fashion model's measurements: 33-23-33
· Projected measurements of a Barbie doll, if she were a full-sized human being: 36-18-33
· Average height and weight of a model 5'9" - 110 lbs
· Average height and weight of an American woman: 5'4" 142
· Percentage of American women who wear a size 16 or larger: 33%
· Percentage of women who diet: 80%
· Percentage of men who diet: 25%
· Percentage of American women on a diet at any time: 50%
· Percent of 9-year-old girls who have ever dieted: 50%
(Schneider).

The average weight of a model is 23% lower than that of an average woman; 20 years ago, the differential was only 8%. (Now.org)


Risks of having a lean-to-fat ratio of less than 22%:

· Hormone imbalance (Fat tissues store hormones you need. Not enough fat = low estrogen)
· Infertility

Risks of a hormone imbalance:

· Ovarian cancer
· Endometrial cancer
· Osteoperosis
(Wolf 192).

Most Miss America contestants are 15 percent below the medically recommended body weight for their height. The body type portrayed in advertising as the ideal is possessed naturally by only 5% of females in this country. (CA Dept Health Services)


A model search, shown in The Famine Within, attracted 40,000 entries. The modeling agency found 4 girls they could use. That means 1 out of every 10,000 girls have legs that are long enough, a neck that is long enough, a stomach that is flat enough, a face that is "attractive" enough, and breasts that are round enough to pass muster. Then they spend at least two to three hours in a makeup chair before they're pretty enough to shoot (with special lighting and pose experts). Then their photos are airbrushed to get rid of all their wrinkles. We're talking about teenagers here...


24% of women polled by MacLean's magazine said they would "give up three years of their life to acheive their weight goals" (Milne 61).


40% of 9- and 10 year-old-girls polled by Pediatrics magazine are trying to lose weight (Hittner 84).


Over 80% of 4th grade girls are dieting.

A large-scale survey of young women revealed that 75% of them thought they were overweight. In reality, 45% of them were underweight (Gilday).


"Children who had leukemia said the worst part wasn't the pain, or the chemotherapy, or the possibility of dying - it was being teased by the other children for not having hair" (Wann 118).


500-1200 calories a day was the standard intake for Jews in the Lodz ghetto.
900 calories a day was standard at Treblinka - Nazi doctors settled on this as the minimum to sustain human life (Wolf 195). How many "miracle" diets, whether they're from a magazine, a fancy spa, or a liquid-meal manufacturer, will give similar nutrition to your body?



The average "fat" woman earns up to 7,000 less per year than her "slender" peers (Wann 80).


"The average healthy twenty-year-old female is made of 28.7 percent body fat. By middle age, women cross-culturally are 38 percent body fat: That is, contrary to the rhetoric of the myth, 'not unique to the industrialized Western nations. They are norms characteristic of the female of the species.' A moderately active woman's caloric needs … are only 250 calories less than a moderately active man's (2,250 to 2,500), or two ounces of cheese. Weight gain with age is also normal cross-culturally for both sexes. The body is evidently programmed to weigh a certain amount, which weight the body defends" (Wolf 192).


Researchers at Michael Reese Hospital in Chicago found that plumper women desired sex more often than thinner women. On scales of erotic excitability and readiness, they outscored thin women by a factor of almost two to one... Studies consistently show that with dietary deprivation, sexual interests dissipate (Wolf 192-193).

A disturbing timeline:

· 1980-Diet foods equal roughly 7 percent of all US food sales.
· 1981-Saccharin (sugar substitute) was a $2 billion market. That's 8 million pounds of the stuff produced in America alone.
· 1984 - Diet foods and beverages were growing three times faster than any other type.
· 1990-Diet and lo-cal frozen meal market is worth $689 million. diet/lo-cal segment of the frozen entree category alone was worth $689 milllion. (Hesse-Biber 35).
· 1991 - The cosmetic industry rakes in $20 billion a year.
· Cosmetic surgery is a $300 billion a year industry
· Pornography is $7 billion-a-year
· Diet industry makes $33 billion a year
· 1992 -472 girls, aged 18 and younger, get liposuction
· 1994 - 511 girls, aged 18 and younger, get liposuction
· 1995 - Alicia Silverstone appears at the Academy Awards. She has another 5 or 10 pounds on her body, which she could easily afford. Tabloids blare "Batman and Fatgirl" or "more Babe than babe." (Schneider 3).
· 1998 - Americans spend $40 billion trying to get thin. The supreme irony: think of how many people $40 billion a year would feed.

Naomi Wolf's suggestions for how we could better spend the $20 billion a year that goes to the cosmetic industry:

· 3 times the amount of daycare offered by the US
· 2,000 womens' health clinics
· 75,000 womens' film, movies,literature, or art festivals
· 50 womens' universities
· 1 million highly paid domestic or child care workers
· 1 million home support workers for the housebound elderly
· 33,000 battered womens' shelters
· 200,000 vans for late-night safe transport
· 400,000 full 4 year university scholarships
· 20 million airplane tickets around the world
· 200 million five-course dinners at 4-star French restaurants
· 40 million cases of Veuve Cliquot Champagne

Marilyn Wann's suggestions for putting $40 billion a year to better use than dieting:

· Put one third of all graduating high school seniors in the United States through four years of college.
· Pay off the federal deficit - twice.
· Build 2.5 Habitat for the Humanity homes for each of the 2.5 million homeless people in the U.S.
· Donate 4 times more money to charities than the combined charitable donations from all U.S. corporations.
· Provide six times more money for the Environmental Protection Agency
· Allocate eight times more federal funding for AIDS research, prevention, and treatment
· Provide nine times as many free school lunches to hungry children
· Buy twenty b-2 Stealth bombers, one less than the U.S. government has
· Increase Medicaid services nationwide by nearly 40 percent
· Run ninety-seven women's universities
· Operate 4,000 women's health clinics
· Create 66,000 battered women's shelters
· Take everyone on Earth out to see a movie

About four fifths of Fijian women are "overweight" by America's standards. "Fijians have traditionally glorified larger proportions and worried more about being too thin than about being fat." 38 months after Western TV became available on the islands, the number of teenage girls with bulimia didn't double, nor triple - it quintupled. Yup. Five times more. The girls who watched most TV (shows like "Melrose Place and 90210 are especially popular") are "half again as likely to feel fat and a third more likely to be on a diet than their peers" (Discover 34).