I don't know about you, but I usually feel rotten after I leaf through one of the popular women's magazines. Have you ever noticed suddenly feeling ugly, fat, frumpy, or flawed after reading a copy of Vogue, Glamour, Mademoiselle, etc.?

Well, it's not a coincidence. The fact is that most women's magazines don't exist to inform, help, or entertain us. The sole reason for their existence is to sell us stuff - mostly stuff we don't even need.

How do they do that successfully? In marketing, it's called "creating a need." They make us feel bad about ourselves so we'll buy products to fix us. It's a nasty little game they play...

1. Magazines cater to advertisers on what content to offer. For example, they won't publish photos of women who love and accept their normal bodies. If they do run an article with that idea (which doesn't happen often), they'll accompany it with a photo of an underweight model. Women who love their natural bodies aren't good customers for the diet advertisers.

2. They consistently depict images of unattainable beauty. Models generally stand about 5'9" and weigh around 110 pounds. The average American woman is 5'4" and weighs 140. Most of us are never going to look like models no matter how hard we try. And not even models themselves can live up to the photoshopped-to-perfection images that are created when their photos are digitally "airbrushed." The media specifically set out to convince us that we are unattractive unless we look like these fake images. Blatant ads or "recommendations" within the articles convince us to eagerly buy products.

3. Then they keep changing the rules. Every magazine issue has a better diet, different makeup, and/or the latest style. They continually promote the newest, best, improved, reformulated, etc. products. There is no way to ever keep up so we keep buying and buying, ever hopeful that the latest purchase will make us look and feel good.

It's a bad trade-off. We spend our days feeling bad about ourselves and squander our hard-earned money on junk. We waste our life energy dieting in a futile effort to change our bodies. Meanwhile, the media and advertisers skip happily along with their ever-expanding profits.

Well I don't know about you, but I'm tired of the message. I am choosing to not look at magazines that depict unrealistic images of beauty, that make me feel bad about myself, or that show endless images of emaciated actresses. I've decided to like who I am rather than trying to emulate anyone else.

I'm taking back my life and telling the media to take a hike. And I'm on a mission to invite others to join me. I'm tired of women wasting their money and their lives. I invite YOU to join me in walking away from the emotionally violent content of today's women's magazines.

I believe that we are each beautiful in our own unique ways. I'm all for taking delicious, nurturing care of ourselves and for being well-groomed.

But I also believe women have a lot to offer the world beyond how we look. And I'm calling on all of us to enjoy life and make a difference in the world instead of wasting our time and money trying to attain the media's impossible version of perfection.