This stuff is so depressing. I can't help but wonder if body image issues (mainly for women) have always existed since the dawn of time, or is this a 20th century phenomenon currently going strong, thanks to advertisers, magazines, Photoshop, and this kind of crap?

This movie's been out for a while and it's really a great film all around. It looks at this "buff" culture that is so prevalent in the States and almost nowhere else to nearly the same degree.

It's so weird to me that this is legal... it's one thing to show very atypical results (like, photograph the one person the diet actually worked for) but just plain fabricating the entire thing?

I always figured that they photoshopped the people's heads onto different bodies. In fact, I've seen before-and-after pictures that can't even possibly be the same person (in particular, I keep seeing one of a pudgy woman being 'transformed' into a ridiculously thin woman with enormous breasts; the pictures are not even remotely the same person aside from skin tone and hair color). And some, it seems like they literally just said 'okay, frown and slouch for the first picture, smile and stand up straight for the second.' I think people might actually prefer seeing real results, even if they aren't quite as dramatic. One particular brand of body shapers (kind of like Spanx, but a different brand) had an infomercial that made sure you knew that it was the same woman and photoshop wasn't being employed. The size 14 woman didn't go into the dressing room and come out a size 2, but you could see a visible difference in the way her clothes clung to her, her waist was more defined and so forth. She looked like the same woman wearing the garment effectively. It was much more appealing than something fake.