Through the use of conventional documentary interviews and narration in conjunction with striking evocative imagery, the film presents women sharing their own experiences suffering with an eating disorder.
The film explores the effects of an ideal feminine beauty on girls and women today, as well as, the social and ideological consequences of their obsession with diet and exercise.
[7] Among the many matters discussed are contemporary notions of the superwoman (an image combining thinness and status); the muddled and extreme moral judgments placed on fatness and obesity in our culture; the relation of the Garden of Eden myth to contemporary concepts relating women to food and nature; the ideological implications of the current “fitness” craze.
She also observed that a scene in which a model carries a perfectly-proportioned mannequin instead of a brief case is probably an attempt by Gilday to add visual variety, but instead seems “forced and almost silly”.
The film presents the case that the modern image of the tall, rail thin supermodel runs counter to nature and ideology and that women are tyrannized by cultural ideals of beauty imposed upon them by patriarchy and the diet industry to the point where one painfully thin young women (who speaks for many) say “I’d rather be dead than fat’”.