As a tutor at my local library, I often see students coming in and carrying boxes of things to sell for fundraising purposes – cookies, cookie dough, buffet tickets et cetera. One day I happened to be tutoring a young girl who was selling bars of chocolate. She asked if I could buy one to support her cause and I agreed.
“What flavors do you have?” I had asked.
“Lots!” she answered, and indeed, as she opened her box, inside were five to six varieties of milk and dark chocolate.
I chose a caramel milk-chocolate bar.
“Those are good,” she had said, “But watch out. Those are two-hundred calories!”
At first, I wondered if she told the nutritional values of each chocolate bar to her customers. Then I wondered if I looked as though I needed to be counting calories. Then I remembered that the previous week, she had shown me a mobile app called MyFitnessPal, an online diary used to log the amount of calories burned and consumed every day.
My student was only in middle school, but already, she was logging down how many calories every piece of food she ingested was. Many menus in restaurants, bakeries and coffee shops now boast a nutritional value next to each item. Is this another way for our society to impose beauty standards on individuals? Or is it simply a decision meant to inform curious customers?
Either way, there are many ideal body types – the quixotic figure varies from country to country, and era to era.
In the year 28,000 BCE, humanoids carved a small statuette, depicting a female figure with grotesquely exaggerated features, corpulent and bulging. Some think that the Woman of Willendorf depicts the ideal body type in that time. In many ancient African societies, rolls of fat were beautiful, since they represented wealth and an abundance of food. In the year 1501, Michelangelo carved a marble sculpture of the biblical figure David, depicting a strong and youthful individual with taut muscles.
From the mathematical proportions in da Vinci’s Vitruvian man to the rigid lines of ancient Egyptian depictions of pharaohs, it is clear that ideal body types have changed as time passes. Even today, society portrays the ideal figure in everything from books and literature to billboard advertisements to commercials.
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