No pain no gain: we’ll stop at nothing for an ideal body

Almost six years ago I broke my leg in a car accident. It was a bad break, requiring bone grafts to repair. For nearly a year, I had to wear an Ilizerof Frame, a complex system of wires and steel bands that looked like a medieval instrument of torture and which held my leg in total immobility, thus giving the grafts time to grow and heal.

Wearing the frame was a horrible experience: the wires grated, infections developed, but in the end, luckily for me, it worked. But there's another use to which the Ilizerof frame is now being put, and I was aghast when my surgeon told me about it. Originally, the device had been invented by a Russian doctor who fitted it on patients who would otherwise have had their legs amputated. In some instances, in order to ensure that the broken bones stayed tightly wedged together, it was necessary for the various nuts and bolts which held the frame in place to be slowly tightened.

It is normal for Brazilians to apply for bank loans to have their breasts enhanced

One day, a nurse accidentally started turning the bolts holding one young man's leg together in the wrong direction - with the result that his leg began to lengthen. For Dr Ilizerof this was merely a curious discovery - but it was to have consequences I am sure he would never have dreamed of.

For what my surgeon told me is that it is now common in China and other Asian countries - where women are shorter than their western counterparts - for teenage girls to voluntarily opt to have their legs broken, then lie in bed while their bones slowly grow to meet each other again, immobility guaranteed by the wires and steel of these cumbersome frames. Some girls, in their desperation to become taller, undergo the process two or three times, thereby gaining up to 10cm in height.

In her new book Bodies (Profile, £10.99), the feminist Susie Orbach bemoans the fate of these girls and of other women around the world who struggle daily with their body image, desperate to achieve what they see as the perfect look, the one held out to us in glossy movies and in the advertisements of cosmetic companies. Being thin, fit and lean have become a goal - one which you must not fail to achieve.

Starving, bingeing, gym fanaticism and surgery are now so commonplace that it is quite acceptable in countries like Brazil to apply for bank loans to have your nose fixed or your breasts enhanced in just the same way as you would