A lot of women feel fat and ungainly and huge and unattractive during pregnancy. Yes there is a feeling of being bloated and heavy and out of shape and off balance. Men however look at it differently: firstly there is an atavistic satisfaction that a man derives from knowing that a woman is carrying his child which he finds a tremendously moving; and secondly men seem to find the more rounded, more womanly shape of a pregnant woman exciting. Many men think of a pregnant woman as the ultimate expression of femininity and a personification of the feminine shape.

Yes pregnancy, childbirth and breast feeding alters our bodies irreversibly, all the things that get added, like the love handles, stretch marks, saggy skin, expanded waist line, baby apron (what a very interesting term don’t you think?), and the less than perfect, even mismatched breasts the list goes on…. But you know what? It’s ALL OK! There is beauty in all those supposed imperfections.

I found this really wonderful site called the shape of a mother.com where women frankly and I think very bravely talk about all their experiences with motherhood, both the good and the bad. Women here have talked about how pregnancy and child birth and breast feeding have altered their bodies and how they wear their scars more like stripes!

I think it is unbelievably brave for women to show their bodies; how they really look, saggy bellies, stretch marks, Caesarean section scars et el. Also unbelievably brave is to be able to put up your before (great looking) and after (irretrievably altered) photos simply so that other women can see them, and realize that they are far from alone and so that they can take inspiration, encouragement and even solace from them.

What I find wonderful is how we women learn to accept our altered shapes and love them, “even though it’s not the one I started out with on this journey” with the “hope that our daughters (and their partners) will have an easier time of loving the female form than we have.”

The fashion industry and advertisers have been using thin models as the norm to sell us products; basically anything from cards, to cars to condos. The explanation offered is that these are the ideals of beauty; that it is these seeming clothes hangers that men desire that women aspire to be. It has always been the case of the fashion industry that people respond better to ‘thin’, that thin sells more products.

Now a study undertaken in Australia has exploded that myth, that thin models sell more products. Health psychologists undertook a study into the response of young people to advertisements. The study sought to measure objectively how people’s response to models translates into buying behavior.

It was found that the response of the subjects was the same, whether the model was of catwalk slender proportions or of a more average body type. 400 young men and women were shown adverts featuring regular (read skinny) models and plus size (read your and my size) models; they showed an equal interest in buying the products in either case.

Then the subjects were asked to respond to other questions; to assess their own body satisfaction after doing the survey . Here the female subjects showed interesting but unsurprising results: women between 18 and 25 years of age claimed to feel better about their own bodies and self image when shown the larger size models than when shown the thin ones.

Phillippa Diedrichs conducted this study as part of her PhD work at the University of Queensland’s Health Psychology Research Unit and says “[This shows] we can change the images we see and still sell products but also make people feel better about themselves.“

With any luck advertisers and the fashion industry at large will be paying attention to this; if they can sell their products and at the same time make people feel better about themselves, surely that is a better option than to peddle an unrealistic, even unattainable body shape and type that is glorified as beautiful?

Personally speaking I find it a little difficult to identify with someone who looks like this picture here; what do you think?

I scan for Plus Size news on the internet regularly and there seem to be parallel events taking place in different parts of the world, which are wholly unconnected, but remarkably similar in nature! Does that mean you can be sexy at any size in any part of the world? Perhaps.

One event was organized in Nigeria, the Big and Beautiful Pageant. This pageant was organized with a view to break the norm that beauty pageants are meant for skinny women. The event organizer wanted shake the mindset of a society that views plus size women as unfashionable.

According to the organizers, the skinny woman who is the norm in regular beauty contests, is an alien concept in Africa, and that the African woman should recognize her worth. The fact that the average African woman is in fact plus size, is also sought to be highlighted, with emphasis also placed on brains and courage. This is the second edition of a pageant, the first of which was won by Tope Lawal. And this is not some marginal or fringe contest; the prize for the pageant was a saloon car!

In a whole other geographical area, namely Israel, there is a similar mindset which gave rise to the Fat and Beautiful pageant which aims to show that beauty comes in all shapes and sizes. The pageant was far from the usual one with contestants enjoying a tasty treat just before the pageant rather than starving themselves for days on end. I would imagine that this would put the contestants in a far more cheerful and cordial frame of mind.

The minimum qualifying weight for the pageant is 80 kilos (I believe that equals 176 pounds), and this pageant has been around for 15 years now! As one of the contenstants said, “It’s been running for 15 years now, and they take women from all over Israel that are plus-sized and beautiful and proud to be big and beautiful. It’s 20 girls, and we are competing for inner beauty, outer beauty, anything, everything.“

And as Khani Yirmiyahu, this year’s pageant winner put it, “Every woman should enjoy the competition and love herself just the way she is. Thank you.“

I got a mail from Nancy early this morning telling me of the sad demise of her grandfather who had long been struggling with cancer of the colon. It was obvious from her words that he was a person who had had a very strong influence in her life as a spiritual mentor and as a well beloved family patriarch. In her mail Nancy quoted one of her grandfather’s favorite quotes. “they’re ALL crazy out there, be careful of the BULLSHIT!” … which I thought indicated what a feisty and interesting character he must have been.

What Nancy’s mail did was recall irresistibly to my mind my own relationship with my own grandfather whose favorite grandchild I was and who passed away almost 15 years ago, which was for me akin to the passing of an era.

Some of my best childhood memories were those of sitting on the huge swing in my grandfather’s (or dada as I used to call him) house. I would return from school and rush to dada, saying ‘story story’ and then we would sit together on the swing and dada would tell me endless stories: moral fables, fairy stories, long and fascinating tales from the Ramayana and the Mahabharata (the Indian mythological texts) and the Shah Nama (the Persian texts related to Zoroastrianism).

My indoctrination into music also began on the swing with my dada. He taught me bhajans or devotional songs in praise of Hindu Gods, although he was a staunch Zoroastrian. My dada was, I firmly believe, a representation of the true plurality of Indian society; of the respect and knowledge that most reasonable Indians have for religions other than their own.

My dada therefore gave me so many things: because he was himself a scholar and very widely read, he passed on his love of books to me. Because he found that music was path to communion with the almighty, he passed on his love of music to me. Since I learnt so much about other religions from him, I also learnt respect and tolerance for other religions; since knowledge is a necessary component of tolerance.

He passed on a lot of his wisdom and his world insight to me. For this and for countless happy childhood hours, I thank you dada.

Once I started to read about body image issues among young boys, I realized that there a lot more to body images issues among men than may meet the eye immediately. In a survey conducted by Psychology Today, it was found that that 56% of the women and about 40% of the men who responded to their survey in 1997 were dissatisfied with their overall appearance.

As women erroneously believe that a men desire a certain physical ‘ideal’ among women, so also men have certain misconceptions about what women want. Research has indicated that many men wish to become more muscular than they currently perceive themselves to be and may desire up to 26 pounds of additional muscle mass. As women strive misguidedly to be thin (under the impression that this is what men want), so do men have the tendency to overestimate the amount of muscle considered ideal by women. Like i said before, most women do not find Arnold Schwarzenegger that desirable!

There is a Barbie equivalent among young boys as well: as girls grow up thinking that you have to be like Barbie (tall, thin, blond, blue eyed) to be pretty, so do boys grow up with action figures sporting ridiculous amounts of bulky muscle. These action figures are often depicted as super-muscular, usually beyond the actual limits of human physiology.

While this male desire for more muscle has amusing nicknames like “The Adonis Complex”, “Bigorexia”, “Reverse Anorexia” etc., this is no laughing matter since this dissatisfaction with muscle mass and negative self image among men does lead to low self esteem, and is cause for great concern.

I think that I have a healthy body image and low self esteem is not an issue that I even had to battle with, but even I have certain areas of my body that I think could do with some improvement, so I thought that I would do a body image quiz. I took this quiz, and it pretty much reinforced the view that I have of myself, and when I took this quiz, I found that there were a lot of interesting (some shocking) statistics that I did not know about.

And if need a laugh after all this serious stuff, visit here for some great body image cartoons.