BAH.

A lot of Americans are overweight. SURPRISE! Something you didn't know!

The media bombards us with unrealistic physical standards of neo-human perfection. REALLY?! You mean Miranda Kerr doesn't look like that in real life???? You CRAZY.

People in entertainment are expected to be exceptionally thin. WOW! I mean, I always heard the camera adds 10 pounds, but.........

When underweight famous people put on a few, they get called fat. NO WAY! Miley is totally NOT fat, she's just...rounder in the face. And Christina, she's just....booze bloated????

Gee, seems to me there's very little healthy medium. So, what gives? What's a girl to do?

Wellllllll.........


If you're Holly Madison, you strip down and show off your cellulite in an un-retouched photo shoot for a magazine in a bid to convince us that you are, under all of that makeup and peroxide, actually just like the rest of us. Sort of like when Jennifer Love Hewett's cellulite was accidentally broadcast to America and she did her best to talk out both sides of her mouth. The "I love my curves!" side and the "by the way, I'm only a size 2!" side, which sent a sort of jumbled message BUT still netted a huge "how I lost the weight!" magazine cover. 

If you're Giuliana Rancic you starve yourself nearly to death then take to the webernets to broadcast your unhealthy relationship with yourself via a "lifestyle blog" where you desperately attempt to convince people that you're "fab! fit! fun!" Sort of like when a girlfriend says "I'm SOOOO over him!!!!!!" you know they're totally sobbing themselves to sleep to a Berlin soundtrack and living off of Girl Scout cookies.

If you're LeAnn Rimes, you stop eating and replace meals with surgery. Nose job, boob job, you name it. All justified under the umbrella that your man "likes skinny girls and you want to keep him happy." Sort of like....um, I don't know, that desperate girl who used her boyfriend's ex-wife's cosmetic surgeon for her new boobs. Oh, wait - same girl. Same act of desperation.

If you're Christina Aguilera, you maintain an air of obliviousness, let them call you chunky, and drown your sorrows in wine and Mystic tan booths. Sort of like what happens to most pop stars when they fall from public grace by doing the things most of us have probably done out of the glare of flashbulbs and tabloid covers. What? Like you didn't go through a boozy phase after a breakup? Or put on some weight after a big vacation was over (that vacation that involved a bikini and nothing but diet coke for the week leading up to the vacation.....MANY of us have been there, I'm not alone in admitting my own body image issues that have lead to unhealthy choices from time to time.......just without the "welfare-related arrests" or the high profile missteps, lyrically OR literally....).

If you're Jessica Simpson you find a man to validate you and swaddle yourself in a series of really puzzling outfits while falling asleep on a mattress stuffed with nothing but cash. Er, at least I'd imagine she does - the girl's clothing empire has netted her millions upon millions - which is, apparently, not enough to convince a girl not to go out in reindeer-printed leggings, but hey, if I were filthy rich........

If you're Kate Middleton you maintain an air of sophistication, poise, class in public. Then when there aren't babies to kiss and boats to commission and royal events to host, you waste away to nearly nothing, leaving you looking rather like the hipless, waistless, bustless pre-adolescent with very pretty hair and lovely suits who gets to accompany Prince William down the aisle, but about whom newspapers write open letters of desperate concern, begging you to "ditch the wedding diet."

Hey, there's no part of me that's claiming to be better than them, or above these techniques. Shoot, I ended up standing in front of a mirror in my undies the next morning wondering if my backside looked better or worse than Holly's (similar, I decided - we carry it in similar places and in similar proportions). So, let's play "guess which one of these chicks actually makes Heather pissed off?"

Is it:

A) The playgirl has-been who admitted to loving french fries and decided to do away with the digital retouching

B) The tabloid TV personality who claims to want a baby so badly she'd do ANYTHING, but would darn near eat the living head off of someone who suggested she might have better luck if she gained 5 pounds

C) The home-wrecking Twitterphile who must realize on some level that the man who cheats to be with her may be the man who cheats ON her, and so goes desperately out of her way to be "perfect," in a vain effort to keep him loyal (or captive, choose your perspective)

D) The drunken diva who seems to have misplaced her son. Or, um, replaced him with a man-child boyfriend who may or may not be part of the problem.

E) The ditsy millionaire who yo-yos depending on the state of her romantic life but can never escape the paparazzi "did she or didn't she gain a few?" scrutiny that was probably enough to drive her little sis to a pretty obvious eating disorder

F) The Once and Future Princess who knows she's about the become perhaps the most photographed woman in the world and is understandably image-conscious on the eve of her big, history-making nuptials

Take a guess.

Who pisses me off the most? Well, it's not Holly Madison and her shadows of normal-woman-thigh. It's not LeAnn Rimes, misguided though she may be - she is her own worst enemy and will probably implode soon enough (or her implants will......yikes). It's not Xtina - she's in denial, and bound to bounce off the bottom soon enough - it will probably have more to do with needing to replace all of her pants - vanity will get her first. It's not Jessica Simpson - she has harmlessly battled a handful of margarita pounds here and there that she admits she's tired of seeing pictures of in the tabloids. It's not Kate Middleton, Lord knows I'd be the planet's least gracious Bridezilla in the face of that brand of notoriety.

Nope - the one that gets a visceral reaction from my (slightly jiggly) gut:

Why that would be option B, one Giuliana Rancic, the not-quite-celebrity with the most-talked-about womb in America. She's thin. Very thin. Too thin. Image-obsessed. Food obsessed. FERTILITY obsessed. She's quick to cite the fact that Nicole Ritchie, Rachel Zoe and Victoria Beckham were all, also, exceptionally thin women who managed to have babies, as though that -- and fertility treatments -- alone were enough to mean that she should manage to, as well.

Her doctor suggested that she put on 10 pounds in an effort to increase the success of her IVF treatments. She gained 5 and balked that it should have been enough. She snapped at detractors and argued that she works in an "image-conscious industry" in which, I don't know, a 10-pound gain would be tantamount to suicide? I don't get it.

SHE is helping to perpetuate the negatively image-conscious industry that's so obviously damaging and SHE is her own evidence why she is NOT fit to be a mother. To care more about those 5 pounds than she cares about creating a healthy environment for an unborn baby is ridiculously selfish. To be more obsessed with her weight than with the welfare of the child she's yet to be able to conceive is...disgusting. To be so afraid that someone might look at a pregnant lady and say, "ew, she looks.....PREGNANT" is obviously painfully unrealistic, and she's so out of touch with the reality of how she ACTUALLY looks that she thinks people WANT to look like her (hence the weird "Fit! Fab! Fun!" website that really serves to propagate her disordered eating and obsession with body image).

Reality check, Giuliana: if you gained 10, we'd probably think you looked pretty. Right now you look....grasshopper. If you gained 10, we'd be able to relate to you a little. You might look good in those clothes. If you gained 10, you'd still be in an underweight percentile, you'd still look good on camera, but you'd demonstrate that you're serious about giving birth to a healthy baby.

Right now - you're just everything that's wrong with our body images right now. So take part in stopping the cycle of abuse - stop the self-hate and the fear of everyone else's opinion and get healthy. TRULY healthy, not website-fluff-calorie-counting-skinny-jean-recommending-we-can-see-straight-through-the-hype sort of healthy.

We may be an overweight nation, but if the other alternative is dangerously obsessed with the state of our upper arms....we're no better off in your "Fit! Fab! Fun!" world than we are in our cellulite-stricken, heart-disease riddled, diabetic wonderland of flab.