Recent media coverage of former bulimia sufferer Debbie Francis has portrayed her as a healthy role model since recently winning the Welsh bodybuilding championships.

Debbie has gone from being a yo-yo dieter of three decades to an award-winning body-builder in just three years. But has her attitude towards body image really changed that much and can body-obsession ever make someone a healthy role model?

Having spent a lifetime with low-self-esteem, mother of one Debbie is now confident and proud of her body. But her preoccupation with her body and appearance as a competing ‘athlete’ is stronger than ever. Just as a perceived defect in her appearance had previously caused her emotional and physical distress, Debbie’s appearance is now being scrutinised more meticulously than ever, the audience’s assessment of which is qualified by an even more rigorous and unsustainable set of values.

There is no doubt that her transformation has boosted Debbie’s confidence, but as a bodybuilder there is little doubt that she has even less control over her own body-image. She is, after all, engaging in a ruthless display of flesh that is not limited to creating cultural ideals of physical ‘perfection’, but actively transcends them.

As Alan M. Klein states in Little Big Men, “Bodybuilding is a subculture of hyperbole.  In its headlong rush to accrue flesh, everything about this subculture exploits grandiosity and excess.”

Considering the negative coverage Madonna’s overworked sinewy frame has received of late, there remains incessant media scrutiny of women’s bodies and scrupulous broadcasting of some celebrities’ ‘could care less’ bikini bulges (good for them, I say!) As far as I’m concerned, Debbie Francis’s obsessive exercise routine is as much an exercise in ‘health and nutrition’ as Madonna’s leotard-clad frame is an icon of femininity.

In Western society we are too willing to concede to conventional notions of beauty. Not only are lauded perceptions of beauty unrealistic (even for those air-brushed lovelies supposedly ‘bearing’ the burden) but moreover I think the proliferation of such ideals by the British (and American) public is totally avoidable.

Rather than advocating such extreme reactions to diet and fitness, we should be opposing rigorous beauty and so-called ‘health’ routines that can have such disastrous results (sorry Madonna) as haggard prematurely aged skin and fatigue, and will ultimately cause damage to joints and ligaments.

Although ‘pumping iron’ in the vein of Debbie Francis can increase bone mass and density, the thoughtless notion that that she can be a ‘healthy’ role model is as ludicrous to me as TV nutritionist Gillian McKeith berating ‘big bums’. What’s next - banning child-bearing hips?!

Besides, where does all this sculpting and honing get anybody? Fitness is not a means to an end, it is a lifestyle: we all have to live with what we are.

By Amanda Carey/MOLI