Let’s not forget the thousands of dollars in every cover touch-up, the duct-taped “back fat,” the split-seamed clothes and the monthly and yearly representations of a literally nonexistent body type and miraculously age-defying skin.

You know it. I know it. We all know it. The jig is up, media. You can stop pretending that these Frankenstein images of women and men exist. Celebrities, who already have personal trainers and cooks, whose job compels them to look as close to societal perfection as possible, still aren’t thin enough, young enough, ripped enough to remain in their element.

How much of this goes through your head in those few seconds you spend glancing at magazine covers?

For me, it used to be none of it. I was hungrily plucking those magazines off the shelves like Sour Patch Kids. Give me Prevention, Self, Women’s Health, Runner’s World, anything that will tell me how to trick my body into being thinner, how to run to drop pounds. I knew all along these women weren’t real, and what’s worse, I believed I could defy my five-year losing streak against my body once and for all — maybe this is the magazine that finally shows me how.

You’re always cognizant of the lies fed to you every day, whether the government’s spouting them off or they’re leaping from newspaper headlines and movie theater posters. But how many of them do you internalize? How many of our actions and choices are affected by fabrications without even realizing it?

Actively acknowledging what’s happening and choosing to reject the deceptions make the difference. At 14 years old, I started dieting. I was a long-distance track runner, volleyball and soccer player. I loved Dr. Pepper and chocolate — and still do — yet for five years of my life, I avoided them like the plague and spent every day laboring over calories and food choices. But I never for a second believed I was trying to look like the women in these magazines.

During those five years, a full-blown, diagnosable eating disorder took over my life. It was neither anorexia nor bulimia, but it had the same devastating control over my emotions and relationships.

It’s hard to find a depiction of an “unconventional” eating disorder in mainstream media, so when you’re not starving yourself or purging through vomiting, you don’t believe you have a problem. Self-deprecation is normalized to a point that we don’t even know we do it. It’s listless compliance with the same destructive behaviors, partially spurned from the images and words we know to be myths, that limits us.

The truth is magazine covers don’t cause eating disorders, and neither does the media — there are so many more factors to consider, so many more social and internal conversations transforming thought and behavioral patterns and corroding self-worth. Lies and manipulation are as strong as we allow them to be, both as a society and as individuals. In the U.S., it takes strength to respect yourself, and it takes even more strength to admit you’re drowning.

When there’s a steady onslaught of visually altered realities swooping in from every conceivable direction, it feels impossible to ever fight back. But there is strength in numbers. There is strength in getting help, there is power in refusing to buy the magazines and the products and in refusing to buy into the lies.

The next time you scorn the girl sitting next to you in economics class for being “too thin,” don’t think for a second it’s easy for her. Anorexic or not, she’s dealing with the exact same pressure, the asininity and the trolls. The media isn’t some Oz-like entity telling you who to be and what to buy — people write those articles and Photoshop those pictures and tell you to lose weight and develop incredibly complex ad campaigns triggering your emotional responses.

People deceive, images mislead and we’re lying to ourselves when we think it’s supposed to be like this.

I can’t stop them from lying, but I can stop believing the fiction.

Catherine Fish is the State News production crew chief. Reach her at fishcath@msu.edu.