WITH impossibly thin waistlines, they have been airbrushed to perfection.

Photographs of waif-like celebrities and models are impossible to escape as they stare out from magazine covers or TV adverts.

Now two young women from Hampshire battling anorexia and bulimia have spoken out to back a new campaign to make sure altered images are labelled.

Girlguiding UK has called for the coalition Government to force the media to take the measures to protect young women.

It says its research shows half of 16- to 21-year-old girls consider having surgery to change the way they look, with 42 per cent of 11- to 16-year-olds admitting to watching what they eat.

Celebrities like Myleene Klass and Davina McCall are supporting the campaign.

It has also been praised by recovering anorexic Hope Jackman, from Portswood, Southampton, who freely admits the daily bombardment of unrealistic body shapes influenced her.

The pretty 17-year-old said: “Part of you knows that it’s completely unrealistic because nobody looks like that. But another part of you thinks, ‘Yes, I would love to look like that’.”

For anorexics like Hope, banishing obsessive thoughts about achieving the perfect body is a struggle.

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She said: “When the body shape is unattainable it is really bad A lot of the time it might make you feel rubbish about yourself.”

Hope was diagnosed with anorexia aged 14 after her mum noticed she was shedding a huge amount of weight.

Since then she has been hospitalised three times, with her weight at worst plummeting to just under five stone. Images of skinny celebrities alone did not cause her obsession with weight loss alone, but she said: “It doesn’t help it at all and it can make it difficult.

“You just can’t help comparing yourself to them. It gets you in a mind set.”

Her condition has wreaked havoc with her school and college work.

She is now coming to the end of her latest treatment at the Leigh House, an acute mental health unit in Winchester, that started in November and has recently been allowed home.

Now six stone, the ambitious teenager is hopeful she can put on more weight so she is well enough to attend college to do her A-levels and then go to university. Along with fellow eating disorder sufferer Kate Hawkins, from Waltham Chase, she supports calls for clear labelling on brushed up images.

Hampshire psychiatrist Dr Alan Wear, who specialises in eating disorders at the Priory Hospital in Marchwood, said labelling doctored images would help reduce the subliminal affecting young women about the so-called perfect body.

He said: “The effect of that imagery is moving people in a vulnerable group into eating disorders.

“There is no doubt that some people are picking this up more than the average person because they are much more attuned to this sort of thing.”

Hannah Turner, a clinical psychologist at the Hampshire Partner-ship NHS Trust eating disorders service, said an increasing number of young women were being referred with eating problems, a situation aggravated by the media manipulation.

She said: “The pressure for them to conform to a certain ideal is increasing the level of body issues that can that develop into a eating disorder. Labelling will highlight the fact these images are not real life.”