For the better part of a year I've been pondering what it is that makes us as Americans love to hate our bodies, and while we're at it, love to have serious levels of insecurity about what we do with our bodies, including sex or possibly, especially sex. Watching the ups and downs ins and outs of diet and exercise fads, particular ways of looking and acting that are all seemingly calculated at making the average person feel fat, ugly, out of shape, and unhealthy.

And while we are suffering from obesity in our nation especially in children (see this article from the American Academy of Childhood and Adolescent Psychology), there are also a lot of people out there who are in decent to quite good phyiscal shape and weight who feel bad about themselves and the way their bodies look.

The inspiration for this article came from three studies I've run across recently, one reported by Newsweek and two from the BBC. The first one was about men in England becoming increasingly unhappy with their bodies and wanting to look more like their favorite sports heros. Unsurprisingly, David Beckham topped the lists of who's physique they'd most like to imitate (see this article).

As a woman, I'm quite familar with women wanting to look like any number of the airbrushed celebs and models in magazines that leap out at us from every shelf, the fact that men are now feeling this pressure doesn't surprise me.

It used to be that the old expectations were to judge a woman by how she looked and a man by what he did. Well, as we've turned tables and women entered the work force and education world, we can now judge women by what they do as well. Thus, judging men by how they look couldn't have been far behind.

Now, we all have equal opportunity to both feel like a loser if we don't perform well on the job or in the educational world, and we can feel miserable because our appearance doesn't measure up to someone else's standard.

Don't read me wrong, I'm not suggesting we go back to a former era, we can't do that anyway. I'm just wondering where we might go from here.

A previous study done by the BBC on women suggested that 91% of the women in UK were unhappy with their hips and thighs. A big majority (73%) thought about their size and shape every day, and a full 65% thought that "their life would improve considerably if they were happy with their body" (click here for full article).

Finally, a recent article from Newsweek reports on a survey of sex therapists about the ideal length of time the sex act should last in order for both partners to feel satisfied. Perhaps surprisingly, the answer came back as between 7 and 13 minutes.

The one thing I found in common between these studies was the emphasis that each person and each couple is unique. Thus the ideal weight for one person is different than another. People with different body types need to figure out what is right for their body type and stick with being in the healthy range for them. Couples need to figure out what works for them sexually and stick with that, not feel pressured to go all night because that's supposed to be more romantic. I don't know about you, but sleeping all night makes me much happier in the morning then trying to sustain passion for over-long periods of time!

A health and fitness expert quoted in the first study I mentioned said "Men need to understand that it's all about being in tune with your own body, not comparing yourself with others or trying to look like somebody else."

And the sex therapists had this to say about ideal sex: "As a society, we have such unrealistic expectations of sex. And that unrealistic expectation translates to our bedrooms. Hopefully, knowing what therapists think are adequate and desirable amounts of time for the sex act will reinforce a more positive message to couples that think they are having problems because they don't live up to an unrealistic ideal."

So what's the bottom line?

Apparently, we need to figure out how to be healthy in the bodies we've got. Being in tune with our own boides is far healthier than trying to look like some celebrity with an entirely different body type. Trying to live up to all the expectations that slip into our lives from all these different sources isn't making us happier: it's making us consistently more miserable on the whole.

When it comes down to it, we do it to ourselves. No, the "media" and the "culture" don't help. But it is us as individuals that decide to buy into these every changing expectations and supposed "norms." We don't have to. We can choose to figure out how to best inhabit the bodies we've been given, to work with them and not against them, to set realistic goals for ourselves and feel good about them when we meet them.

Simple? Yes. But sometimes the simple things are the best.