In Charla Krupp's book How Never to Look Fat Again, she details certain things that a girl should avoid if she doesn't want to look as big as a bus. Bright colours and skirts with volume are two of her 'Don'ts', so she'd have been well ashamed of me at the weekend.

The thing is, dressed in my screaming magenta cotton frock with big skirt (including - shock horror - pleats at the waist), I may indeed have looked two feet tall, but I got plenty of male attention. Lots of looks, lots of smiles, lots of heads turning (often looking quite sheepish when they saw I had the DH in tow). When it comes down to it, there is a great big fat difference between dressing to look thin and dressing to look sexually appealing.

I've been fat and I've been thin, so I know that men like women in all sizes and can cope perfectly well with a bit of cellulite - what they don't go for is wallflowers, hunched shoulders and women who dress like little brown mice.

The thing is, too, on Saturday I felt absolutely rubbish. I had an upset stomach and nausea, and a bloated tummy (those pleats were very welcome) and I would really rather have stayed at home. So teamed with the magenta dress went stiletto-heeled boots, a tight little black cardigan, a fitted pink tweed coat and a lilac ostrich-finish handbag. Also, a full face of slap, including blusher and bright lipstick to give me the colour that nature had so thoughtlessly removed.

And after a couple of hours of trolling round town and picking up admiring male glances, I felt a hell of a lot better. I am no spring chicken, and not by any means a skinny chick, but clearly I'm not quite dead yet, either.  

Following an earlier article I wrote on the subject, I was pointed at this article by a Second Cherry reader, about a campaign to have digitally altered images labelled as such.

It is only a shame that, as usual, the moves to force the use of more realistic imagery of women in advertising are so heavily blocked by corporate interests. 

It is principally by making women feel dissatisfied with themselves, after all, that the fashion and beauty industry can continue to sell us products we don't actually need, and they have billions of dollars invested in making us feel crap. 

Mentioned in the article is the incident last October when Ralph Lauren attempted to take down bloggers who reproduced the ghastly ad shown at top left (in which the model's pelvis had been photoshopped to be smaller than her head). Ralph Luaren claimed copyright infringement, but BoingBoing claimed fair comment, and won. 

So, folks, here it is again, just to annoy Ralph Lauren.

I'm sure we are all well aware that ALL images are now retouched, but few people realise by quite how much. It t'olden days, every bit of retouching took a deal of time and could only be done once, so freckles, etc, were removed and eyes brightened, but there was no time to go around lenthening legs and bodies and arms and necks in the way it is almost universally done today.

The average model today has been Photoshopped to look like 'an anorexic with a  boob job' says one commentator, and that is about right, but so bad is the retouching on the Ralph Lauren image above that some people believe it MUST have been a publicity stunt. 

Why then did the same company use this image (near right) just a week later in another campaign? Note the hips, which are about half the width of the poor girl's shoulders - you can see her correct proportions in the right-hand image. 

And why did Filippa Hamilton, the model in the jeans ad, later say she had been fired for 'being too fat'? If you want to see just how fat her size 8 figure is, click here.

The thing is, Ralph Lauren has a track record where this is concerned. Anyone much younger than me is probably too young to remember the controversy they caused in the early 1980s when they were among the first companies to use really spectacularly thin models. Their girl of choice back then was Saffron Aldridge, who was considerably thinner and bonier than the usual models of the day such as Cindy Crawford and Naomi Campbell. Not since the late 1940s when many of the most famous models were suffering from malnutrition had we seen such angular cheekbones. But little by little we all got used to the bony look until it somehow became the norm. 

Now, though, it's all gone way too far, when the 'desireable' image thrust at women is not only to be underweight and follow a body shape (wide shoulders, big boobs, very tall) that falls only to very few, but be thin to a degree that is actually anatomically impossible. 

French women are the thinnest in Europe but don't realise they are, while lardy Brits think their weight is normal, according to research from France's National Institute of Demographic studies.

Although five per cent of French women are clinically underweight, they don't believe themselves to be - they think their weight is normal. "This shows that what people consider an ideal weight in France is lower than in other countries," said the study's author Thibaut de Saint Pol.

Meanwhile, many British (and Spanish and Portuguese) women who are not thin appear to think of themselves as 'seriously skinny' - perhaps because they are simply not as overweight as their peers.

Overall, in this study, which covered 15 European countries, only the French have a majority of people of both sexes in the 'normal' weight range as advised by the World Health Organisation - in every other country, people are moving into the overweight ranges (a Body Mass Index over 25). 

The study also found some interesting differences between the sexes. Women who are underweight rarely appear to denigrate this - to be underweight is to be thin, and to be thin is to be desirable in European culture: it is when women gain weight that they find it unacceptable. However, men are more likely to denigrate themselves for being underweight than for being overweight, because a certain degree of overweight is seen as showing strength.

However, for any woman carrying a bit of weight after Christmas, there is one ray of sunshine - their men are generally in worse shape than they are. The mean weight for men is overweight in every European country except France and the Netherlands.