It angered me this morning when I read about the 88 pound Brazilian model that died due to the eating disorder anorexia.

CBC News reported that 21 year old Ana Carolina Reston died on Tuesday of an infection caused by anorexia nervosa. The young woman started modeling at the tender age of just 13 years old (when she probably had the ideal body structure for a model). However as she aged in the fashion-conscious hub that is Brazil, she, like many models, succumbed to a fear of weight gain, a distorted self-image, and rapid weight-loss - in order to keep her 13 year old figure.

Now is it just me, or is there something seriously warped about this story? I’m not putting the blame on Ana Carolina Restin; I’m putting the blame on us…on society as a whole!

A culture that sees their young women defeated, trying to attain a rail-thin, unrealistic body shape that we have collectively deemed “the ideal”.

Don’t for one second pull the “what me?”! Don’t tell me that society doesn’t glamorize models with trash like America’s Next Top Model prancing its way all over weeknight television. Don’t tell me that if people stopped tuning in to garbage like this, and stopped buying magazines that featured walking coat hangers that the media would continue to flaunt it in front of us – because THEY DAMNED WELL WOULDN’T!

By glamorizing this image we are endorsing eating disorders – there’s no ifs ands or buts about it!

I applaud Spain's top fashion show, the Madrid Fashion Show, one that in September banned 5 models from strutting the catwalk for being, that’s right, too thin – whooohooo! The show’s organizers barred any model with a body mass index below 18 (just so you know a BMI below 18.5 is considered underweight). One organizer stated that, "[The models] had a body mass index below…well below…that which is considered normal by the Spanish endocrinology society [and] also by the limits set by the World Health Organization.”

Just to leave you with something to compare that too, poor Ana Carolina Reston, who was 5-feet-8, had a BMI of 13.4 at the time of her death.