Good luck to you.

These days, any sign of body imperfection, particularly being overweight, will bring down the wrath of society -- that is, the Internet. In recent weeks, comedian Amy Schumer, actor Wentworth Miller and model Iskra Lawrence have all faced digital scrutiny of their bodies -- but whether you're a celebrity or not, you may find yourself the victim of image-shaming

Renee Engeln, a Northwestern psychology professor and the director of the university's Body and Media Lab , notes that our image-heavy (pardon the pun) culture has brought out the critic in everybody.

We've always cared about appearance, particularly for women, she says, but technology has made the focus stronger than ever.

"It's never been this intense, this relentless," she said. "There have never been so many forums in which you can gaze at different images of women, evaluate them, comment on them (and) share them with your friends."

And it's not just celebrities anymore, she adds.

"There used to be a class of people who had to worry all the time about how they looked, because it was their job," she said. "Now we don't really have a front line between those people and everyone else."

'The F word'

Our media culture loves thin.

To look at movies, TV shows and photo spreads is to enter a world where there isn't an extra ounce to be found. Women show off impossibly sleek dresses and revealing bikinis; men wear slim-fit shirts and boast washboard abs. Reality shows make a virtue of weight loss; tabloids sneer at celebrities who have "let themselves go."

Want that to be you? Diets and exercise programs promise a healthier, fitter life in mere weeks -- sometimes days

Indeed, "fat" is the word that dare not speak its name: Large women are "plus-size" or "Rubenesque" or "zaftig"; large men shop at the "big and tall" store.

And yet thin wasn't always in, as fashion and branding expert Rachel Weingarten points out, noting the large bellies and hips of ancient fertility goddesses and the fleshy models of the Old Masters (including, of course, Peter Paul Rubens).

"If you think about it in terms of history, the point was that people who had meat on them, that means they could afford food," she said. "That was a status symbol."

Today, says Engeln, status has gone the other direction.

"In countries that have a lot of stuff, it's not hard to gain weight. It's hard to stay thin. So being thin becomes a mark of status, because it means you can afford the gym or all that healthy organic food, and you live somewhere where it's safe to go out for a walk every night," she said. "So thinness has really become a marker of status, and when things are associated with status, we want them."

Tricks of technology

And we don't want to be fat. The fat person is an easy target -- even for children.

"Fat hatred has become so pervasive that it is part of the fabric of our language and interactions," Robyn Silverman, author of "Good Girls Don't Get Fat: How Weight Obsession is Messing Up Our Girls and How We Can Help Them Thrive Despite It," said in 2012 . "Fat and thin are no longer simply assessments of size or weight but rather of character. So you can imagine why adoption of these attitudes, diet talk and disordered behavior is happening earlier as well."

"An awful lot of us hate fat people, and the fatter we become, paradoxically, the more we hate them (us)," Richard Conniff wrote in a Men's Health essay titled "I Hate Fat People."

Though nasty comments about looks are associated with Internet trolls, it can also play with our own minds -- particularly adolescents, says Engeln. In a selfie-loving society, it's not unusual for people to take dozens of pictures of themselves before posting just one image, she says, all to get that key social currency of "likes" and "favorites."

"There's a series of consequences to thinking of yourself always in how you look to other people, and that's what a lot of this intense media focus has done," she said. Eating disorders are one effect of this thinking, she observes, but not the only one: it may also lead to depression and anxiety.

Photos: Celebs take a stand against retouching Kerry Washington took to Instagram to criticize the April 4 AdWeek magazine cover, on which she appears. "It felt strange to look at a picture of myself that is so different from what I look like when I look in the mirror. It's an unfortunate feeling," she wrote. Hide Caption 1 of 15 Photos: Celebs take a stand against retouching Lena Dunham posted this photo of the cover of Tentaciones magazine on Monday, February 29, claiming that the publication had heavily edited it. But El País, the Spanish newspaper that publishes the magazine, says it made no changes to the shot. Hide Caption 2 of 15 Photos: Celebs take a stand against retouching Vogue's February 2014 issue featuring Dunham came under fire from critics who said it was severely edited. Not long after the issue was released, website Jezebel put up a $10,000 reward for anyone who would submit pictures of Dunham before they were retouched. Dunham tweeted, "10K? Give it to charity then just order HBO." Hide Caption 3 of 15 Photos: Celebs take a stand against retouching Lady Gaga was featured on Glamour's December 2013 cover. Gaga received an award from the magazine at the annual Woman of the Year Awards and took the stage opportunity to speak about body issues and Photoshopping celebrities, using her cover photo as an example: "I felt my skin looked too perfect," she said, according to the Huffington Post. "I felt my hair looked too soft. ... I do not look like this when I wake up in the morning. What I want to see is the change on your covers. When the covers change, that's when culture changes." Hide Caption 4 of 15 Photos: Celebs take a stand against retouching "Pretty Little Liars" actress Ashley Benson posted to Instagram in regards to a poster promoting the show in 2013, "Saw this floating around . . . hope it's not the post. Our faces in this were from 4 years ago... and we all look ridiculous. Way too much Photoshop. We all have flaws. No one looks like this. It's not attractive." She also wrote, "Remember, you are ALL beautiful. Please don't ever try and look like the people you see in magazines or posters because it's fake." Hide Caption 5 of 15 Photos: Celebs take a stand against retouching Gisele Bundchen urged more advertising campaigns to embrace imperfections and steer away from over retouching, and embraced her ideals as seen here in the BLK DNM fall 2012 campaign. "I loved his approach because I feel like women should be really real and raw and it doesn't really happen anymore" in fashion photographs, she told Fashionista. "I love that feeling of, you know, we are women -- we are so different. Our imperfections are what makes us unique and beautiful. He gets that. He's not trying to retouch you or put a pretty light on you." Hide Caption 6 of 15 Photos: Celebs take a stand against retouching H&M's summer 2013 campaign featuring Beyoncé created some heat when the brand attempted to retouch some of her curves. The Sun reported that "when Beyoncé found out they had edited the way her body really looked, she hit the roof. She's a true diva and was furious that she had been given such a snubbing. Her people refused to give the pictures the green light, so H&M were forced to use the originals." Hide Caption 7 of 15 Photos: Celebs take a stand against retouching Jennifer Lawrence was featured in Dior's spring 2013 ad campaign. After it came out, the actress told "Access Hollywood," "That doesn't look like me at all," referring to the retouched photos. Lawrence also spoke with Yahoo! CEO Marissa Mayer, saying, "The world has this idea that if you don't look like an airbrushed perfect model. You have to see past it. You look how you look. You have to be comfortable. What are you going to do? Be hungry every single day to make other people happy? That's just dumb." Hide Caption 8 of 15 Photos: Celebs take a stand against retouching When Coco Rocha was featured on Elle Brasil's May 2012 issue, she took to her Tumblr and had this to say: "As a high fashion model I have long had a policy of no nudity or partial nudity in my photo shoots. For my recent Elle Brazil cover shoot I wore a body suit under a sheer dress which I now find was photoshopped out to give the impression of me showing much more skin than I was, or am comfortable with. This was specifically against my expressed verbal and written direction to the entire team that they not do so. I'm extremely disappointed that my wishes and contract was ignored. I strongly believe every model has a right to set rules for how she is portrayed and for me these rules were clearly circumvented." Hide Caption 9 of 15 Photos: Celebs take a stand against retouching Jessica Simpson appeared with air-dried hair and wearing no makeup for the May 2010 cover of Marie Claire. Simpson told the magazine, "I don't have anything to prove anymore. What other people think of me is not my business." Hide Caption 10 of 15 Photos: Celebs take a stand against retouching OK! Magazine's February 1, 2010, issue featured new mom Kourtney Kardashian and was shot just seven days after her newborn's birth, WWD reports. Kardashian told WWD, "They doctored and Photoshopped my body to make it look like I have already lost all the weight, which I have not." She also tweeted, "One of those weeklies got it wrong again...they didn't have an exclusive with me. And I gained 40 pounds while pregs, not 26...But thanks!" Hide Caption 11 of 15 Photos: Celebs take a stand against retouching In March 2009, Complex magazine accidentally featured a non-retouched image of Kim Kardashian for several hours before replacing with the retouched image. "So what: I have a little cellulite," Kardashian wrote in a blog entry entitled "Yes, I am complex!" "What curvy girl doesn't?!" Hide Caption 12 of 15 Photos: Celebs take a stand against retouching Brad Pitt was featured unretouched on the cover of W Magazine's February 2009 issue. Pitt personally requested to be photographed by Chuck Close, who is famous for his extremely detailed portraits, and opted for no retouching."You can't be the fair-haired young boy forever," Close said. "Maybe a photograph of him with his crow's-feet and furrowed brow is good for him." Hide Caption 13 of 15 Photos: Celebs take a stand against retouching A 2004 promotional poster for "King Arthur" revealed a more well-endowed Keira Knightley than her typical boyish figure. Knightly has complained about her breasts being digitally altered for promotional movie shots and in reference to the "King Arthur" poster told a magazine, "those things certainly weren't mine." Hide Caption 14 of 15 Photos: Celebs take a stand against retouching Kate Winslet has famously rejected retouching since her cover shoot for the February 2003 issue of GQ. Regarding the issue, she stated, "The retouching is excessive. I do not look like that, and more importantly, I don't desire to look like that." She also mentioned, "I actually have a Polaroid that the photographer gave me on the day of the shoot. ... I can tell you they've reduced the size of my legs by about a third. For my money, it looks pretty good the way it was taken." Hide Caption 15 of 15

Don't expect it to get better. Technology, particularly Photoshop and CGI, can perform tricks that would make a Mannerist painter chartreuse with envy.

"For the next generation of teenager, it's going to be hard not to hate yourself a lot more physically, because what we mirror to them is so godlike," director Nicolas Winding Refn told New York magazine recently, noting the prevalence of CGI body-tweaking in film. "If you look at the greatest movie stars, we identify much more with imperfection than perfection."

Engeln, who's 40, sees it in her students.

"I'm thankful every day that I did not grow up in the era of digital photography and social media," she said.

Fighting back -- with empathy

There are certainly good reasons to lose weight. Obesity brings with it a risk for health disorders including diabetes, hypertension and sleep apnea.

But nobody has ever had to be told that they're fat, says Engeln.

"If you're commenting on a stranger's appearance, it's not because you care about health," she said. "You don't care about people's health by shaming them."

So what can be done about the shaming trend?

Some women are fighting back.

JUST WATCHED Amy Schumer's epic response to fat shaming Replay More Videos ... MUST WATCH Amy Schumer's epic response to fat shaming 02:20

Sewing blogger Jenny Rushmore started a trending hashtag after a commenter told her to "eat less cake."

And after YouTube comedian Nicole Arbour posted a routine mocking fat people , "My Big Fat Fabulous Life" star Whitney Way Thore responded with her own video.

"Fat-shaming is a thing; it's a really big thing, no pun intended," Thore said . "It is the really nasty spawn of a larger parent problem called body-shaming, which I'm fairly certain everyone on the planet, especially women, has experienced.

"The next time you see a fat person, you don't know whether that person has a medical condition that caused them to gain weight," Thore added. "You don't know their mother just died. You don't know if they're depressed or suicidal or if they just lost 100 pounds. You don't know."

Indeed, though it's probably a kumbaya pipe dream, a little more empathy would probably do society a world of good -- especially in the age of selfies.

"Why does anyone have to be 'other'?" asked Weingarten, the fashion expert. "As a culture and as a society, it will never go away fully, but ... we should try not to be judgmental."

That's what actress Melissa McCarthy, who has known her share of criticism over her size, said about the most recent imbroglios.

"We have to stop categorizing and judging women based on their bodies," McCarthy wrote in an Instagram post. "We are teaching young girls to strive for unattainable perfection instead of feeling healthy and happy in their own skin."

We have to stop categorizing and judging women based on their bodies. We are teaching young girls to strive for unattainable perfection instead of feeling healthy and happy in their own skin. "Imagine we are linked not ranked." Gloria Steinem A photo posted by Melissa McCarthy (@melissamccarthy) on Apr 7, 2016 at 8:44am PDT

Something worth considering, whatever your skin may hold.