The controversial "muffin top"

The image above is cropped from a photograph of professional model Lizzie Miller taken by Walter Chin for the September issue of US Glamour.

'It's a photo that measures all of three by three inches," gushes Cindi Leive, editor of US Glamour in a post on the magazine's blog, "but the letters about it started to flood my inbox literally the day Glamour hit newsstands." The picture in question, illustrating a story about body confidence, has generated more than 700 comments on the site...

Lizzie Miller, the 20-year-old model in question, agrees that it's astonishing that, at 5ft 11in and 12.5 stone she's considered a "plus size" model. "It's sad," she says. "In the industry anything over size six is considered a plus-size." Miller, who is around a US size 12-14 (that is, either average or slightly below average...

Additional discussion in another column at the Guardian today:

...even the most beautiful women in the world – Heidi Klum, Renée Zellweger, Nicole Kidman – had what we have all been brainwashed to believe are 'imperfections'. I was told over and over again by management that unadulterated women wouldn't sell magazines. I once left all the lines on the face of one actress, and was roundly told off." Jones says the reason we are sold "perfection" really is as blunt as trying to make us to buy more products. "The advertisers and publishers need us to believe the lie that if we do what we are told – buy stuff – we will look like the women in the pages of the magazine. People in the industry always say women prefer fantasy and aspiration, but I don't think that is true: we want honesty, we don't want to feel bad about ourselves, thinking we are the only women with cellulite or wobbly tummies."