In desperate attempts to achieve the “ideal” weight and shape, many students turn to disordered behaviors such as restrictive dieting, a variety of fat burning or muscle building products, exhaustive exercise, and/or cigarette smoking. They may starve themselves because they hate their bodies, eventually overeat because they get over-hungry, feel incredibly guilty after eating, and then try to get rid of the unwanted calories.

Keep in mind that your weight and body composition are determined by a number of factors. Some of these factors (such as your calorie intake and level of physical activity) can be manipulated. But other factors (such as your body type, bone structure, the way you store fat, and other genetic variables) cannot be manipulated. Most people simply lack the raw materials to build the “ideal” body, regardless of how strict they are with their eating and exercise regimens.

Consider this, only about 5% of American women have the ultra-long and thin body-type that is seen almost exclusively in the media. Women who attempt to achieve this body type (but lack the genetic material to do so) are setting themselves up for years and years of yo-yo dieting, weight fluctuations, disordered eating, and depression.

Similarly, the body ideal projected to boys and men in most muscle magazines and cartoon action figure heroes is impossible to achieve without illegal anabolic steroids. In most cases, if a man claims to have achieved this ideal with hard training and strict diet alone, he probably didn’t. There is a physiological limit to how much muscle a man can attain naturally, given his height and body fat percentage. In other words, it’s physiologically impossible to gain unlimited pounds of pure bulging muscle mass while maintaining an ultra lean, ripped body (with only 3-7% body fat)–even when following the “perfect” training and diet program. Once you reach your maximal muscle mass, any further gains will come from both muscle AND fat. So, men who have greater muscle mass/size tend to have higher body fat percentages as well (e.g. 10-15%).

Thus, it is important to be realistic when determining how you want to look to avoid sacrificing your health and happiness for an impossible goal.