"The body is broken, both how we feel in it and how we feel about it. We have allowed our bodies to become the business of others.

"To fix the glitch, we need to find the road back to our self."

Such is the mission of The Body Hoax: How to Stop Believing in Fantasy Bodies, a new book by Helsby Holistics therapist Emi Howe.

For years, Emi, who is also a sociologist and TEDx speaker, has been thinking about bodies: the great chasm between how we see them and how they really are.

"I think women and girls, and increasingly men and boys, are going through such a disconnection with their bodies," Emi says.

"There are the fantasy bodies that exist on social media, on TV and in advertising, and then there is the real world where bodies come in all shapes and sizes. They always have and they always will. You could call it the natural diversity of bodies.

And while this natural diversity abounds in everyday life, it is rarely pictured in the media, where skin is smoothed, hair made shinier and waistlines shrunk.

"It is not a subject that we talk about a lot, it just gets shoved under the carpet in all of our endeavours to lose weight or have clear skin or great hair," Emi says.

"We like the look of these media bodies, we want them, we are taught to believe that we can have them," she continues, "but our reality is really different.

"Younger generations are in the eye of this storm because, especially with lockdown, they have spent so much time online, which means more and more time on social media and watching television.

"Because of that, they've spent more time in this fantasy world and less in the real world, so much so that the two become merged."

With our phones always within arm's reach and the internet just a click away, the glossy unreality of media images, from 'plandid' Instagram posts to airbrushed anti-aging cream adverts, begins to seep into the fabric of our daily lives.

We start believing that these fantasy bodies are actually all around us, that we are the odd one out in this parade of perfection.

It is Emi's ambition to dispel this myth, to remind us that, no matter their shape or size, our bodies are and always have been exactly what we need them to be.

Part memoir, part manifesto, The Body Hoax charts Emi's return to health from a cancer diagnosis; her campaign for better visibility for everyone; her passion for raising awareness; her work with major brands and some romance on the side - the love affair she is having with her body!

"There are so many reasons why I started writing this book," Emi says. "The first incarnation of it was definitely written to myself: it was something for me.

"I found a naked, pre-cancer photo. I looked at it and burst into tears," Emi writes in The Body Hoax. "My body was SO beautiful. How could I ever have thought that body wasn't good enough?

"In that moment a realisation came into focus. I had been taught to feel like that. It wasn't real, but conditioned - programmed in me. I made it my mission to change The Glitch."

Campaigning for change

In the beginning, "The crux of the book was about healing myself," Emi tells me. "I wanted to find the answers to the things that have been bugging me for the last 30 years, ever since I was a teenager reading magazines and wondering what was wrong with me.

"It's been quite a journey of discovery and I've learnt so much along the way."

Emi's initial research culminated in a petition lobbying the Advertising Standards Authority and the government for true body diversity in the advertising, as well as the creation of her awareness-raising business BodEquality.

"There are so many people saying the same thing as me, but the media is not being held accountable for it," Emi says.

"I think this is such an under-discussed conversation. The whole machinery of why and how we think the way we do about our bodies is just fascinating.

"Because what we think about our bodies has really got very little to do with our bodies themselves and a lot to do with other people and how they want them to be.

"We're not born with these thoughts, we don't begin life feeling like this about our bodies, but it's a full-time job to counteract all the messaging we see around us."

The Body Hoax aims to act as an antidote to this media conditioning, helping us to reconnect with our bodies as they really are, rather than dreaming endlessly of what they could be.

"I want this 'body intelligence' in everyone's heads," Emi says. "It's incredible what we don't know about the one thing we're most involved with! The myths surrounding our bodies equate to an absurd waste of our time, of our lives!"

The beginnings of change?

In recent years, with the body positivity movement gathering momentum, Emi has noticed a promising shift in the images we see in the media.

There is now an ever-growing list of clothing and underwear brands whose models span a more realistic range of body types, as adverts inch towards a more inclusive representation of our reality.

She acknowledges, however, that even with people of different sizes being chosen to model clothes, the images we see still only account for a tiny proportion of the population.

"Where is everybody else?" Emi asks. "It's great to see and it's all going in the right direction, but it's still very piecemeal."

"An amazing piece of kit"

The Body Hoax is, in part, a celebration of the body that sustained Emi through her cancer diagnosis and treatment.

"You can go to sleep and your body will fix you. You don't have to do anything: our bodies are working 24 hours a day, trying to get back to health all the time.

"That is an amazing piece of kit. It's more specific and effective than anything else in the world and all we do is say: "It's too fat!"

"There is so much we don't acknowledge or we're not aware of when we talk simplistically about our bodies and diets. We should all have that information in our heads.

"One thing that really upsets me is how women bond over their negative body image," she says. "especially when they are just meeting each other.

"It's such an easy go-to conversation starter to complain about your body. It spans cultures and languages. We could talk about literally anything else, but we don't.

"Instead of defaulting to self-deprecation or self-criticism when we talk to each other, we could be having different conversations that celebrate our natural diversity."

Emi hopes that by informing people about the realities of media manipulation and body-conditioning The Body Hoax can help spark some of these positive conversations.

"The first reader responses have been fabulous: everyone says that they have found it really powerful so I'm really pleased about that."

You can read more about The Body Hoax on the BodEquality website, as well as on Amazon.