WE ARE continually confronted with the challenge to have the perfect, fit and healthy body. There is no hiding place. The messages range from the subliminal to the slap in the face.

There is the constant reminder of the need for wrinkle-free faces, toned tums, slender figures and a perfect coiffure. The power of advertising always rolls around this arena either directly – telling us to shape up – or doing it in more cunning ways.

You too can own this car, have this mobile phone – but make sure you look like the people being used to encourage you to buy these items. It’s insidious.

How much attention people pay to these messages is difficult to quantify, but certainly enough to keep all those myriad of companies dealing with ‘the look’ in business. I’m not talking here about healthy eating and the fight again obesity and anorexia. Those are altogether different issues.

What we have here in our slick day and age is the promulgation of an attitude that says unless you buy into this mantra you are not one of the ‘in crowd’. And of course adding fuel to this raging fire set off by the advertising pyromaniacs is also how you dress.

It’s a whole package and can leave you feeling left on the fringes as the human race charges on to the glory of perfection. The trouble is the whole thing is bunkum. It’s effectively the modern equivalent of the dubious individual rolling into a Wild West town and selling a miracle substance from the back of his wagon. The gullible gather and his patter sucks them in.

What all this striving for perfect conditioning fails to deal with is nature. You can dress how you like, use every cream under the sun and spend your time at the gym 24/7 but one thing’s for sure. You will not stop the aging process.

And let me tell you part of that unstoppable it involves expanding waistlines, loss of muscle tone, less energy, wrinkles, grey hair (or losing it altogether), hair growing where it didn’t use to and problems with the memory. Those are the facts of life and try as you might that tide cannot be held at bay.

So it was with both some interest and astonishment that I read a report last week that said 70 and 80 year olds should be encouraged to pump iron. For a kick off most of them probably don’t even know what the phrase means and think standpipes are on the brink of returning to our streets.

This idea has emerged from Indiana University in America – the land of the Perfect Human Being – and the report says they should work out down the gym two or three times a week to stay strong.

I mean no disrespect to 70 and 80 years olds, but the pictures conjured up of them sweating away in their lycra gear pumping iron is enough to put you off your breakfast for a month. This simply isn’t a world they should inhabit.

Age often brings with it wisdom and part of that involves being comfortable with who you are and how you look. And also the discovery that any hope of the perfect body is rapidly disappearing as the variety of noises emerging from yours, the pains and aches in it and the continual changing shape and added wrinkles daily testify to the fact.

As someone once told me; I don’t want to arrive at the end of life with a perfect body, I want to get there with one that I’ve had fun using up.