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This is part 1 of a three-part series.

I distinctly remember when the seeds of discontentment were sown. I was watching The Devil Wears Prada—the scene where Andy Sachs (played by Anne Hathaway) walks into the office for the first time post-makeover, decked out in a Kristina Ti brown tweed miniskirt, a black wool crepe Chanel jacket and thigh-high boots. The camera follows her reverently—almost in slow motion—as she crosses the floor to her desk, flips her newly straightened hair over one shoulder and answers the ringing telephone with “Miranda Priestly’s office!”. Meanwhile the jaws of her co-workers hit the floor.

Now, I’ve never been overly concerned about my appearance. I don’t stand in front of the mirror for hours, obsessing over skin imperfections or the shape of my hairline. I don’t have a daily or even weekly appointment with the scales to see how much weight I’ve lost (or gained). I do make efforts to coordinate my wardrobe, but I tend to buy very practical clothes that aren’t that fashionable and don’t cost very much, and I favour a lot of black, which isn’t that hard to match with anything.

Nevertheless, when I saw Anne Hathaway looking completely fabulous in her new designer threads and trendy haircut, it made me want to throw out all my acrylic jumpers and start again. All of a sudden, I was worried about the size of my stomach and that pimple on the end of my nose. All of a sudden, I coveted things like Italian leather shoes and waterproof liquid eyeliner. All of a sudden, I wished I looked like the models in the magazines, with their luscious lips, firm young bodies, heart-shaped faces, and glorious hair.

I realised then that I had a problem. But it’s not just my problem, it’s actually a problem we all face to varying degrees. It’s the problem of the disparity between how we look and how we want to look.

The more I think about it, there are three things that contribute to and even exacerbate this problem. Firstly, there’s the media. The media thrusts these images of perfectly formed nymphs and Adonises onto us through movies, television, magazines and advertising, laying down a certain standard of beauty that has been formulated by the gatekeepers of fashion and good taste. The perfect woman has full breasts, a slender waist and legs that go for days; the perfect man has a chiselled jaw, broad shoulders, and a six pack resembling Michelangelo’s statue of David. Faced day by day with these specimens of physical perfection, it’s no wonder we feel we don’t measure up.

Secondly, there’s the people around us. Our closest friends may not be as superficial as the Plastics in Mean Girls, but it’s hard not to feel inadequate when everyone around you looks like they’ve just stepped off a Paris Fashion Week runway, and when shop assistants look you over from head to toe and then ignore you. Social pressure tends to reinforce the standards shaped by the media, and even if we rebel against it, we tend to imbibe these unspoken judgements unconsciously.

However, thirdly, it’s not just external forces that arouse our discontent, it’s also our sinful hearts. We want others to find us attractive because attractiveness is valuable social currency. We want to be liked. We want to fit in. We care about the praise of men because it makes us feel good. And so we try to lessen the disparity between our bodies and the ideal by exercising, undergoing beauty treatments, and dressing ourselves in Dolce & Gabbana.

All this affects how we feel about ourselves, how we treat ourselves and how we treat others. If we don’t think we measure up to the world’s standard of beauty, we may fall into depression or despair. We may punish our bodies (through intense exercise, overeating or under-eating), willing our minds into victory over our matter in an effort to mould our flesh into the thing we crave. We may not think we matter much compared to the “beautiful people” around us. Or we may think other people are better than us because they’re one of the elite.

In any case, what we are doing is forging a psychological link between how we look and how we feel about ourselves. This means that when we think we look good, we feel good, and when we don’t, we feel bad. And that presents us with an ever bigger problem—a problem I’ll explore in more detail in part 2.

By Karen Beilharz