In order to support societal standards of how the body should look, it is evident that now more than ever, mediums are promoting criterion of the slender look. First, magazines are increasingly becoming a medium by which people gain trustworthy advice and knowledge from. One example of this is how the female fitness magazine “SHAPE” enforces slim ideals. Markula illustrates how SHAPE’s section entitled “Success Stories” urges weight loss. This section often promotes the idea that in order to be happy, one must change from fat and unhealthy to thin and healthy (Markula, 1995, p. 432). Obviously, this creates oppressive disciplinary control over women. In order to be happy, women are left to believe that they must be thin. Rather than stressing the reality of the issue, which is: in order to be thin, you first have to address and improve issues of self-esteem, SHAPE magazine swaps this order and imposes that a woman will not be happy until she loses excess weight. As a result, females are left to believe that thin is happiness. As stated previously, magazines are a source of trustworthy information for many people. They mould one’s sense of perception. Unless a person understands the psychology of weight loss, which most of the general population does not, there is a failure of skepticism on the part of the reader to understand that in actuality, being happy first is a means of being thin. Guillen and Barr conducted a study based on the popular adolescent magazine called “Seventeen” (also known as the ‘best friend’ of high-school girls in the United States). Their findings illustrated that between 1970 and 1990, the magazine “greatly contributed to the current cultural trend of thinness” expected by women whether they be adults or adolescents (Guillen & Barr, 1994, p. 465). Clearly, magazines have and continue to impact the fragile, impressionable minds of females in developed, affluent societies.