Heather Kew used to tell people “everything was great” when really it wasn’t.

She spent 10 years struggling with a disease where she turned to the toilet again and again.

“I didn’t know what bulimia was,” she said. At 16, she hadn’t heard about it before. She thinks the idea might have come from a movie, an idea driven by image.

Last week, about two-dozen first-year University of Victoria women’s studies students came out to support young women like her, and the importance of positive body images in the media.

They were calling for altered photos to carry disclaimers similar to cigarette cartons. The students lined up near the fountain with paper bags on their heads

One read: “I am more than my appearance.” Other protesters held collages of concocted images – barely-there models in tiny nighties, celebs with plastic poses – perfectly airbrushed play-things.

“I think it’s unrealistic and I think it’s harmful,” said student Kathleen Ross. “I think young women don’t always understand that these images aren’t real.”

Until recently, John Buchan, one of only two males in the class, didn’t understand that either.

He stood in a line of yoga-pant-wearing paper-bag princesses, while holding a poster of sexy, ultra-fem models.

“When I see these images of young women I think that’s an attractive young woman or that’s an attractive young woman,” he said, pointing out famous movie stars. “And it really makes me feel as a young man that I could only be attracted to a woman of that stature, with that body,” he said.

He said professor Jo-Anne Lee’s class really “opened his eyes.”

“This image of Scarlette Johansen, she’s been photoshopped, she probably has a saggy under arm, she probably has cellulite,” he said.

“They got really incensed when they realized most of the images that they see are not real,” Lee said.

“They’re fed up.”

Kew said she’s finding her voice in counseling, and is now in recovery.

While disclaimers on photos is not a magic antidote to negative body image, Lee said it’s time to recognize one-dimensional photos for what they are: fake.

lweighton@vicnews.com