Pecker said:
But, Coke, if you're happy with what you've been blessed with, how could you feel inadequate?
I don't think those two concepts -- "happiness about what you got" and "inadequacy" -- are all that mutually exclusive. Think about standards of beauty in general. Let's be honest. A lot of the men and women we see in fashion billboards, runway shows, athletic fitness magazines, prime-time TV, they just don't look like
us, everyday people.
Sure, we could spend a ton of money (e.g. liposuction, expensive gym memberships, personal trainers, elective surgeries, laser hair removal) to look as much like them as we can. Really, drastic changes like that without these high-cost endeavors are nearly impossible for a lot of us. Thinking of body weight, for example, our bodies are genetically engineered to stay with a set range after pubesence, notwithstanding stuff like pregnancy or binge eating. So, for an average-build man of 175 pounds -- good size, bit of a paunch, but not qualifying as obese -- for him to get cut, shredded, ripped, vascular, etc., would take an inordinate amount of time and energy and resources that a lot of us can't muster.
Can it be done, though? Is this a subtle attack on our more athletic members of the species? Absolutely not. The choice to make these body changes is irrelevant. The bigger question is,
why?
Sometimes a drive to make positive change can become so consuming that it ends up being pathological -- as in the case of anorexia, bulimia, muscle dysmorphia, etc.
And in a general sense, people may not see themselves as beauty equivalents of chopped liver, but at the same time, they wouldn't be the first to hit up the heavy weights or take their shirts / slip into two-piece bikinis. And you certainly don't have to appreciate people who tend to flaunt their looks in a narcissistic fashion instead of simply feeling good in their skin. Those emotional disparities exist.