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It’s always an interesting study in sociology to examine how popular mass media interprets the concept of “Body Image” campaigns.

Take the celebrity news and gossip show Access Hollywood, for example. Now in its twelfth season of syndication, the popular newsmagazine and half-hour television show has declared November to be Body Image Month.

Here’s a sampling of the kinds of the kinds of “pro-body image” Access Hollywood features:

• Star Jones talks about her radical gastric bypass surgery
• Thanksgiving with Tony Orlando: Access catches up with a slimmed-down Tony
• David Kirsch with five easy tips on how to shed those Thanksgiving pounds
• Christie Brinkley & Rachel Hunter: How do former supermodels stay so thin?
• Healthy Thanksgiving: David Kirsch gives tips on how to avoid the feast fallout

And that’s not all. A drop-down makes it easy to look up such body-affirming tips such as the Cabbage Soup diet, the Master Cleanse program, and other “foods to avoid.” You can also get the low-down on Eva Longoria’s Wedding Bootcamp workout or take Marlee Matlin’s Get Fit Challenge.

But don’t forget to love yourself as you are, mmkay?

At Access Hollywood, it seems only thin women are admitted to Club Positive Body Image. All others: Lose weight then apply.

On the other side of the pond, BBC America is poised to celebrate December as its Body Image Month, with five one-hour U.S. premiere documentaries featuring such uplifting shows like “My Big Breasts and Me,” and its less-endowed counterpart, “My Small Breasts and I,” “476-Lb. Teenager,” “Teen Transsexual” and “Super Skinny Me.”

According to The New York Sun writer Brendan Bernhard, the series is intended to encourage people to learn “how to live with, and accept, the body you’ve been given — a viewpoint toward which the series generally and respectably tries to nudge us.”

Oh, really?

The “476-Lb. Teenager” (premieres Sunday, Dec. 9, 10 p.m. ET/PT) documentary features “Britain’s fattest teenager,” who recently underwent radical surgery to remove 90 percent of her stomach. Here’s a synopsis featured on The Futon Critic:

She’s since lost 96 pounds, but surgery hasn’t stopped her life-long habit of comfort eating. Even worse, with her new, smaller stomach, she finds eating certain fibrous, healthy foods difficult. The surgery also doesn’t shelter her from stares and hurtful comments. Bethany said of her experience, People stare at you, children say, Mummy, why’s she like that?’ If someone had been particularly horrible to me, like a drunken person across the street shouting, Oi, you fat b*tch!’ I’d feel so low.

It seems as if BBC America’s goal is to inspire positive body image in viewers by making them think, “Whew, at least I’m not as fat as her!” Oh, and don’t forget to accept your body as it is, unless you’re fat, in which case you should totally have gastric bypass surgery.

“Super Skinny Me” (premieres Sunday, Dec. 2, 10 p.m. ET/PT) sounds a bit more constructive, even though it virtually provides the recipe for a ready-made eating disorder. Two journalists, Kate Spicer, 37, and Louise Burke, 28, embark on an extreme diet in which they cut their caloric intake from a normal 2,500 per day to a Spartan 500 or fewer calories per day, while also exercising like Richard Simmons on crack.

No weight-loss means are too extreme in the diet, inspired by plans followed by celebrities and models. The journalists try everything from colonics to protein shakes with the goal of dropping five dress sizes in five weeks, plummeting from a size 8 to a catwalk size 0.

The ostensible aim of the experiment is show the true cost of the “Hollywood look,” said Burke, although I’m afraid the effect will be just the opposite, providing new “tips” and ideas for women to incorporate into already disordered eating thinking and behaviors. Said Burke:

The last thing I want to do is show people how to lose the weight. The aim of the experiment is to show and highlight all the horrible, nasty side effects. I don’t think I’ve ever been so unhappy in my life.

Based on Bernhard’s description of the documentary, it’s interesting to note just how easily a diet can develop into extreme behaviors and even an outright eating disorder. After just one week, Spicer – who begins the program insisting she has good body image – begins to sound eerily of the rhetoric pro-ana advocates use to reinforce eating disorders:

“I’m in a world where food does not happen,” says Burke. “And I’ve got used to it. And actually, it saves you a lot of hassle, not thinking about food. It is quite strangely energizing in some ways.”

Even more striking, writes Bernhard, is how Burke’s determination to shed the pounds becomes all-consuming, until she begins to resemble a fanatic in the generic sense. Not so striking, of course, to anyone who’s ever battled an eating disorder.

With the circles under her eyes growing blacker by the minute and her face even more ashen than it was to begin with, she looks as if she could just as easily attack an embassy as pay another visit to the gym. She — or at least the version of her that emerges from the editing room — has become the kind of person whom the poet Wallace Stevens disparagingly referred to as “the lunatic of one idea / In a world of ideas.” And yet we warm to her determination to succeed, perhaps because there is almost always something admirable about single-mindedness.

Let me remind you, there is nothing admirable in starving oneself. There is nothing to be gained in losing yourself, both literally and metaphorically.

With such uplifting and body-reaffirming shows like these, I’m just glad the popular mass media doesn’t decide to make every month Body Image Month.