Women and their Bodies.. We should all feel beautiful!

A cute little naked baby is grinning at the camera.

"Is this the happiest she'll ever be about her appearance?" asks the slogan on the billboard.

The ad was for a campaign to save future generations of women and girls from hating their bodies.

For the explosion in cosmetic surgery - and explosion of breast implants inside women's bodies - is just a symptom of a corrosive unhappiness that begins only a few years after birth.

Three British psychologists have studied the effect of Barbie dolls on five to eight-year-old girls.

Yet, if Barbie were a real woman, her waist would be 39 %smaller than the average anorexic patient, and she would be far too thin to menstruate.

Despite this skeletal state, she miraculously has big breasts.

It is a body shape so unattainable that the chances of a woman naturally having her proportions are fewer than one in 100,000.

And guess what? The girls in the study who played with Barbie became more dissatisfied with their own bodies and were more likely to say they wanted to be thinner than the girls who were given a normal-shaped doll to play with.

Is it surprising, then, that the average age at which girls start dieting is now eight? Or that the Barbie effect does not wear off?

According to an American study, adult women who look at thin models in advertisements take just one to three minutes to feel worse about their bodies than they did at the start.

A control group who were shown only the products without the models experienced no change in mood.

Women feel depressed because the ideal shape to which they are constantly exposed is almost as remote from reality as Barbie's.

For a start, even the models - who are chosen for their preternatural proportions and beauty - don't look in real life as they appear in the ads.

Their skin has been made flawless by airbrushing, their legs lengthened, waists narrowed and curves enhanced by digital manipulation.

Then, of course, there is the surgical work.

Models have got thinner and thinner over the past few decades and, as all women know, if you lose weight your breasts get smaller too.

It's almost impossible to be stick-thin and have big boobs - unless you go under the knife.

So the "ideal" shape for a woman has become physically unattainable, however little she eats or however much she exercises. She can hope to achieve it only by having silicone in the shape of chicken fillets inserted surgically, and potentially dangerously, into her breasts.

Fashion mannequins are now six inches taller than the average British women - in heels, they measure over six feet.

We need a far more diverse range of role models, from gorgeously voluptuous to tomboy-thin, from young and fresh to old and distinguished.

People come in all shapes, sizes and colours, and so does beauty. This obsession with one narrow ideal is doing not just our heads in but our bodies too.

It is time to drop the artifice - the airbrushing, the manipulation, the surgery - and get real.