When I first saw the billboard ads for Georgia’s anti-childhood-obesity initiative — which debuted to much controversy toward the latter part of 2011 and were discontinued in early 2012 — the wordplay and pun-fulness of the text accompanying the stark, sad photographs actually reminded me of some of the well-known “pro-anorexia” mantras out there.

You know, things those of us who starve ourselves whisper in the back of our minds — cling to like a life raft in a violent surf, clutch like a talisman in our back pocket just before the winning lottery numbers are unveiled — in an effort to contort our willpower past the urge to eat a Dorito. These include such gems as:

“Nothing tastes as good as skinny feels.”

“A moment on the lips, forever on the hips.”

(If you didn’t know, welcome to the anguished, illogical, creepy world of an eating disorder.)

The singsong tone of these sayings so artfully disguises their viciousness, the destructive shame they conjure. Yes, they are just words strung together in wee sentences that sound positively foolish and thus seem of little consequence. They are quite powerful — insidious — however, as the eating-disordered mind (or any addicted mind) will grasp at any sort of “logic” to keep itself safe, contained, thriving. To make self-destruction seem like hands-down the best idea that could have ever possibly existed ever.

[On a side note, from the annals of I’ll-never-again-get-to-mention-that-I-know-this-useless-factoid-so-I’m-going-to-put-it-in-here pop culture: “Nothing tastes as good as skinny feels” was allegedly the brainchild of ’90s heroin-chic model Kate Moss, and, since its birth into our catalog of catchphrases, it has rightfully been condemned, ridiculed, stomped on, banned from T-shirts, etc.]

À la Miss Moss’ proclamation, the quips in the Georgia ads — such as “It’s hard to be a little girl if you’re not” — have a nice, tidy ring to them that masks their cruelty, their condescension, the way they compact a very vast, tangled problem into a shipshape slogan. And the slogan goes: You’re different because you’re not thin. You should be thin. You should want to be thin. You should be trying to be thin. Otherwise, you’re a punch line.

According to Children’s Healthcare of Atlanta, the pediatrics organization behind the billboards, the purpose of the ads (which also aired as TV spots) was to get people’s attention. To wake them up to the seriousness of childhood obesity — this buzzword of an “epidemic,” this utmost burden on our society, this crisis worthy of government intervention. If the goal is to get the youth of our nation of slovenly scale-tippers and their parents on a path toward a lifetime of healthy eating, however, motivating them via shame seems a tad plenty ill-advised.

The desire to have an honest, un-sugar-coated conversation about childhood obesity is a fine objective. But tapping into shock value and shame in lieu of presenting actual solutions clouds that goal, and, I believe, can have unintended consequences.

I recently ran into a friend from college whom I hadn’t seen in about a year and a half. Cooing hellos and exchanging hugs, my mind began grasping for something more to say that would convey how happy I was to see her, how awesome I think she is, how I value her being in my life still. And I wanted something that would make her feel all warm and fuzzy inside, too.

In haste, I came up with the painfully unoriginal, instantly regrettable, “You look so great!”

Inside, I cringed at the words — not because I didn’t mean them, but because my means of communicating the serendipitous delight, the rush of sweet nostalgia I felt at suddenly reuniting with my friend hinged on her physical appearance.

Complimenting someone’s appearance is the knee-jerk approach. Acknowledging what’s right before our eyes — a person’s exterior — doesn’t require leaving autopilot, nor does it require we even know a person well, which is why I (and why I suspect many of us) lean on the appearance-based compliment quite often. The effortlessness of complimenting someone’s looks opens the floodgates for us to heap compliments on anyone in eyeshot, and giving compliments feels good, and so on.

But I want to give better compliments. I don’t want to express admiration, gratitude, love on autopilot. I crave alternatives not so much for myself, but because I believe we, however unconsciously, learn to value about ourselves what others indicate we should. If I am noticed or praised most often because of some aspect of how I look, I could naturally translate that to mean that what meets the eye is the most important part of me — my strongest suit, my wisest investment, who I am. And as the ladies of Beauty Redefined so perfectly put it: “There is so much more to be than eye candy.”

So I asked myself: What am I trying to say that I’m glossing over by mentioning something physical? What if I didn’t sidestep that thought?

Uncloaked, the compliment I want to give is the simple yet powerful, “I’m so happy to see you.” It’s precisely what I intend to say via my appearance-based compliment a good 90 percent of the time, so why not just go with it? Variations on the expression are many and flexible, and, although I’m not attaching my words to anything concrete, something about this compliment feels much more rooted, real.

My hunt for body-free accolades met a remarkable ally in blogger Elizabeth Patch, who has assembled an invigorating list of 10 ways to compliment a woman without mentioning her looks.

And I plan to keep pursuing even more alternatives. Sure, sometimes someone really is just wearing an awesome pair of boots or has a gorgeous new haircut. But being more mindful of the messages I send via compliments feels empowering, because sometimes even the smallest, most seemingly insignificant moments — brief reunions, water cooler banter, passing in the hallway — count a lot toward the big picture.

In June, the American Medical Association (AMA) took a stand against the retouching of photos in advertisements, stating, “such alterations can contribute to unrealistic expectations of appropriate body image — especially among impressionable children and adolescents.”

Many activists and organizations that promote positive body image quickly lauded the gesture — at last, validation from the medical community what so many of us have been saying for years. As affirming and as powerful as the AMA’s declaration was, I couldn’t help wondering how we’d arrived at a point where the country’s largest physician organization felt the need to go on record saying that “correcting” bodies to align with a homogenized, unattainable, “perfect” standard of beauty probably isn’t the best idea.

Digital nipping and tucking in print media — whether in advertisements or editorial content — has become such the status quo and such the worst kept secret ever that egregious before-and-after examples of it show up frequently on pop culture blogs. Unlike other modes of public deception, our awareness of Photoshopped images hasn’t hindered their prevalence over the years.

In other words, tampering with the facts is OK when it comes to the body.

The Photoshop wand has become so brazen that even some of those who benefit from it — mostly young, female actresses and musicians — have spoken out against it, among them Kate Winslet, Rachael Leigh Cook and Britney Spears.

“I’m constantly telling girls all the time everything is airbrushed, everything is retouched to the point it’s not even asked,” actress Rosario Dawson recently told Shape magazine. “None of us look like that.”

But will opposition from the AMA and a handful of celebrities usher in any meaningful change in the grand scheme of our conspicuously cropped, corrected world? I wouldn’t hold my breath.

The “revolution,” so to speak, cannot be brought about by external factors such as policies, campaigns, a famous person going against the grain. If these fixed anything on their own, we’d have all been “cured” long ago, now striving to have the strongest, healthiest bodies and revering images of bodies in their natural, truthful form.

We must first and foremost adopt internal policies, which can no doubt be inspired by the many terrific positive body image initiatives and dialogues going on at present. The AMA’s policy and comments from women in the spotlight are significant and have drawn worthwhile attention to the assault on the body at the hands of digital manipulation. But the difference between lasting change and an ephemeral headline on The Huffington Post will be each of us, on our own, deciding we value and would rather look at what’s real and “imperfect” than what’s fake, redundant, unattainable and subliminally hisses, “You’re not good enough.”

The time to start fighting back against unrealistic body ideals is now. Step No. 1: Change your mind.

Every once in a great while, a piece of writing comes along that conveys to a hilt some inner sentiment you’ve always had but were sure was unique unto you. Such instances are pure magic, and it happened to me with the Feb. 15 New York Times commentary For Actresses, Is a Big Appetite Part of the Show? by Jeff Gordinier.

The context of my sublime moment was the familiar sit-down magazine interview with a female celebrity on the cusp of the release of her next movie or album. The scene seems innocuous enough, but after the perfunctory headline is out of the way, it happens, seemingly always: “The starlet, usually of slim and gamine proportions, appears to thwart our expectations by ordering and consuming, with conspicuous relish, a meal that might satisfy a hungry dockworker,” Gordinier writes.

As a magazine enthusiast, I can’t count the number of times I’ve opened up Glamour, Cosmo or some other women’s mag with a beautiful, stylish, thin female celebrity on the cover hoping to read something about what makes her tick (or at least what’s in her Netflix queue). Instead, I’m informed outright that this gorgeous, impeccably fit woman always orders the jumbo stack of pancakes or loves her some mac and cheese.

The a-ha moment for me came when Gordinier explained that one Hollywood insider has actually coined a phrase for such occurrences of overt gastro indulgence: the “DIPE,” or “documented instance of public eating.” In other words, these frequent displays of decadent dining are no coincidence, and I wasn’t hung up on them because I’m perhaps more struck than the average person by a markedly featherweight actress claiming she never passes up extra bacon on her double cheeseburger. We’re all supposed to notice.

Unlike Gordinier, I never questioned the DIPE. I would instead think, “What’s wrong with me? Why am I not able to eat like that and look like that?” I think this mindset is quite common among people with eating disorders. “This is normal,” I would tell myself of any given DIPE. “I’m clearly the weird one for not being able to feast fearlessly on any and all food and still be a size 0 and have a $1 million CoverGirl contract. After all, every magazine interview with every female celebrity can’t be wrong.”

I fell for the DIPE without qualification.

I’ve found throughout the years that so many of the media influences that make me insecure about my body are really pushing some other agenda. Most often it’s to sell me something — and with the DIPE, it’s selling an idea. “Ultimately, the DIPE is meant to convey that a starlet is relaxed, approachable and game,” Gordinier writes.

And why shouldn’t she be? And why shouldn’t we believe that she is? The problem arises in that publicists, journalists and the stars themselves think the way to convince us of this is to have the star chow down with abandon on foods one would think off-limits for a skinny, successful, desirable woman. The disconnection in this logic is abrasive.

“Any individual DIPE may not shed much light on the inner life of the latest actress,” Gordinier writes. “But collectively, their frequency seems to tell us something about societal standards, judgments and yearnings.” If food, size, weight and appearance weren’t so central to our culture and to our evaluation of female beauty and, ultimately, female worth, perhaps the DIPE wouldn’t exist. And maybe we could actually glean something practical and — dare I say it! — inspiring from the ladies in these magazine articles.

Illustration by Michael C. Wittee, from the New York Times

To much fanfare, First Lady Michelle Obama launched the national Let’s Move! campaign in February 2010, planting a government-sanctioned spotlight on kids’ nutrition and unleashing a blitzkrieg of initiatives aimed at tackling childhood obesity, taking its lunch money and rubbing its face in the mud out by the swing set.

A touch more eloquently, the Let’s Move! website describes the program as having “an ambitious national goal of solving the challenge of childhood obesity within a generation so that children born today will reach adulthood at a healthy weight.”

With one-third of Americans ages 2 to 19 classified as obese, the mission of Let’s Move! and other kids’ health crusades is an estimable (if conspicuously lofty) one.

But simultaneous with the mainstream touting of “childhood obesity” as a veritable national crisis — an “epidemic” that merits mentioning in any and every news article about health or food in the United States — a significant number of American children are developing eating disorders, and this fact, no matter how much less face time it gets on the evening news, is equally as troubling.

In an interview with the Chicago Tribune in January, David S. Rosen, professor of internal medicine, pediatrics and psychiatry at the University of Michigan, said the U.S. government published data in 2009 showing individuals under the age of 12 were the fastest-growing population of patients being hospitalized for eating disorders.

“Many of us believe that the focus on obesity prevention, especially with young children, has had the unintended consequence of increasing eating disorders in susceptible individuals,” Rosen said. “Some younger kids handle the nutrition messages in ways that are too rigid, inflexible, and that get them into trouble.”

While outright anorexia and bulimia may be relatively uncommon, Rosen said many people who have eating disorders don’t have symptoms that meet the strict criteria necessary for one of those clinical diagnoses, but their conditions (known as “subthreshold” eating disorders) are nonetheless serious and potentially life threatening.

“We should start to be concerned when children express weight concerns, when they talk about or start diets, or if their activity level suddenly rises outside of usual recreational or athletic activities,” Rosen said.

But through the lens of Let’s Move!, wouldn’t what Rosen describes be acceptable — even encouraged — behavior?

Something is wrong here. We must find a way to convey the importance of a healthy diet and lifestyle to kids without creating a confusing panic around the body like we currently are — pushing a rigid, polarizing, one-size-fits-all prescription for health that is to some extent founded on hyped nutritional myths and misinformation.

We must be mindful, too, not to deem that the “cure” to childhood obesity is simply to eat less and sign up for indoor soccer. Children who are obese are rarely so just because they eat too much, and obesity’s link to inactivity isn’t as substantiated as it has been portrayed. In come factors such as family income, location, class, genetics — complex variables that don’t so easily fit within the equation Let’s Move! and society in general seems to be trusting to solve “the challenge of childhood obesity.”

Clinical psychologist Edward Abramson suggests a possible solution to the conundrum may be to disregard weight loss as a goal when it comes to talking with children about health and nutrition, and to instead just encourage healthy eating and enjoyable physical activity sans mention of calories or pounds. “The concern about juvenile obesity is thoroughly justified,” Abramson writes. “But unless approached with sensitivity, well-intentioned interventions can have negative consequences.”