By Katharhynn Heidelberg

It’s happening again.

Or, maybe I should say it’s still happening: People are still obsessed with their weight, still base their self-worth on their outer appearance, and worst of all, still fall for every gimmick and fad diet to come down the pike.

Every time I go to the gym, I have these conclusions reinforced, and I have made a new discovery: distorted body image is not limited to the obese.

Picture three women in a gym: one normal body weight and lookin’ fine; another, thin, with the type of muscle definition most can only dream about, and the third, an envy-eliciting scrawny. What are they talking about? How happy they are with their healthy bodies? How good it feels to be physically fit?

Nah. The ladies I overheard were talking about how they "failed" to meet the mark of perfection, and discussed the great lengths to which they were going in order to lose weight. Don’t get me wrong — they are to be commended for coming to the gym every day and for being health-conscious, and everyone has a different means of achieving weight- lost success. But from this point, their paths each took some alarming twists.

Ms. Normal Body talked about how, although she cooks food, she apparently never eats any. While I cannot dispute the nutritional value of a salad and some nice squash, I find it hard to believe she gets enough calories from them to properly fuel her intense physical workouts. (In fairness, I do not know if the meal she described was typical for her, but it still made my eyes bug).

Ms. Muscle Tone chattered about the many weight-loss measures she had taken, and seemed happy about them all. This is certainly well and good for her, but I wonder if she ever stopped to consider that, if any one diet or pill or protein drink had been truly successful, she wouldn’t be trying out others.

Ms. Perfectly Thin listened with rapt attention to all of Ms. Muscle Tone’s plans, especially the extremely questionable, potentially dangerous low-carb diet. Never once did her companions do her the favor of an honest snort and the words, "You don’t need to lose any weight!"

How could they? They didn’t need to lose weight either, and yet, appeared to be trying like the dickens! They betrayed obsessions no different from those women who are either non-active, overweight, or both. Why?

I like to call it the "diet lie." The ultimate selling point of any weight-loss product, be it a diet, a drink, a pill, a magazine or exercise equipment, is the promise that a perfect life is the natural end-product of a perfect body. The above women prove this is untrue — if they were satisfied with themselves and their lives, like every diet on the market "guarantees" participants will be, why do they still have the same issues as those who are overweight?

If a great body is the answer, why did I just read about how a healthy, twenty-something woman with a perfect body obsessed over her thighs so much that she demanded a liposuction surgery that killed her? According to her mother, she died over "less than two tablespoons of fat." She never found the answer that some people with far from perfect bodies understand implicitly: image is nothing.

But martyrdom is seductive. We’d rather say no to the chocolate cake so that we can look as if we are in control, than make ourselves happy. Never mind that we will think about chocolate cake for the rest of the day.