Why You Shouldn't Compare Your Body to a Celebrity's

Sitting on the sofa, flipping through the pages of the March issue of Glamour magazine, I came across a cheer-worthy body image item. There, on page 205, was a brief Health item titled "Celebs Admit: Staying in Hollywood Shape Sucks."

Why is this cheer-worthy?

Because as many women and even girls know, it can be a struggle not to compare yourself to media images of beautiful celebrities -- made all the more difficult at times by accompanying interviews that quote the celebrity as saying she never diets or rarely works out or eats a hot fudge sundae every night. You get the idea. In this brief Glamour piece, however, Gwyneth Paltrow is quoted as saying, "I kill myself. I put in a minimum of an hour and a half, five days a week...it's not good genes."

It's a subject I touched on in You'd Be So Pretty If...the fantasy world of film and television brings with it real-world pressures to be thin that most people don't face in our everyday lives. When your daughter admires a celebrity and wonders why her body doesn't look like her idol's, that's a great time to have a conversation about the pressures celebrities are under to stay so thin -- and what they often have to go through to stay that way.

Instead of striving to look like her favorite star, encourage your daughter to strive to be the healthiest and best version of herself. That's good advice for us moms, too.