As few as six hundred years ago, “skinny” was not a synonym for either “beauty” or “health.”  There was a time when a woman was considered both beautiful and healthy if she had a shape.  Full hips, full breasts, and a curvaceous figure were praised assets, because they depicted a female who was flourishing and blossoming into womanhood.  Those traits meant that she was healthy and that she would be able to bring forth many children.  Granted, that is something of a sexist view in modern times, but nevertheless, it used to be true.  We can trace these facts through art.  Mona Lisa was not a thin woman; in the Birth of Venus, by Botticelli, his Venus was a lush, voluptuous vision of beauty, and her pale skin carried with it the pink undertone of high good health.  During the Renaissance, “healthy” women were almost always what we, today, would consider chubby.  By the same token, extremely thin women were viewed as sickly and unhealthy. 

Today, our standards are completely different.  To be considered beautiful, women must be slender.  They do not necessarily have to be physically fit or even healthy; if they are skinny, then they are beautiful, and they are assumed to be the epitome of health simply because they are thin.  If a woman has a few extra pounds, is actually overweight, or if she is obese, then to the majority of society, she cannot possibly be beautiful and she most certainly is not healthy.  It is true that people who are severely or morbidly obese are not healthy, but the answer is not to try and crash diet until they could fit into small clothes.  Weight is, in many cases, as genetic as eye color and height.  A woman can be curvaceous and healthy – the two are not mutually exclusive.  Heroin-chic models with prominent ribs and shallow skin are not beautiful just because the media says that they are.  Beauty is dependent on so much more than outward appearances, but by all accounts, being healthy is beautiful – and it is not dependent on being so skinny that you look sickly.