Pigott said: "My perception of beauty altered as my body did." to emphasize the link between body modeling and the perceived image of the perfect body. .
Then she stresses on the influence of the dominant culture in which an individual is controlled and driven to think and see in a different way to the point of conditioning: "The ideal they represented no longer made sense." And this is constant wherever somebody goes. In Pigott's case, she faced just another conditioning when she was back in Canada. The problem lays in the image somebody associate with body beauty.
When she started her aerobic exercises, Pigott "pictured Gambian women pounding millet and dancing in a circle with their arms raised high", the verb "pictured" holds the secret of this conditioning: everything a person picture or imagine is considered by this person as a part of her own internal reality .
I don't mean to paraphrase or rewrite the text, but this following sentence is really worth analyzing and criticizing: "We were a roomful of women striving to reshape ourselves into some kind of pubertal ideal. I reverted to my natural state My freedom had been temporary." (Pigott, par.14) Not only she confirms the radical change of her effort (in Gambia she was striving to eat to fatten and in Canada she strives to reshape), but she also validate the altered state she is in. The paradox between her natural state and her freedom, meaning in Gambia, is really meaningful.
So, the text Adding Weight to an Image of Beauty of Catherine Pigott is a well representative real story that underlines the impact of the dominant culture we live in on our perception of beauty. And Pigott take her personal experience as the major argument to defend her thesis and ideas. However, it would have influenced the reader more if the author has mentioned how suffering sacrifices can be to have the ideal body.
That is why I chose the second text Bodily Harm by Pamela Erens to complement the first one and come up with a generalized thesis.