Body Image

Hello my friends and fam!! Life has been crazy busy lately. I'm in college full time, {LOVING it!} and working of course. So far I absolutely love gaining wisdom and knowledge in my academics. I especially love my writing class. Which brings me to a topic I want to write about, Body Image. If you have ever struggled with an eating disorder or known someone who has then you definitely know what I'm talking about. It can effect the clothes you wear, the places you will go or not go, your social life, love life and even your family life and so much more. You could be body checking all the time and not even notice. When I lived in Logan for a lot of the time I was so obsessed with my body. I never felt fit enough or pretty enough. Quite plainly there wasn't much I liked about myself. Not to mention I had the worst relationship with food. That might sound crazy or odd if you have never encountered this subject before but it is extremely serious. So many woman and teenagers die from starving themselves, either with Anorexia or Bulimia. You can end up gaining excess weight from where you weighed in before and be more depressed. It is a very sad mental illness. These woman and young girls constantly think about food and their bodies all day long. Forget tests at school, things they need to accomplish for work and spending time with friends or family. They are usually spending close to 100 percent of their time focusing on how they can accomplish their goal weight. Which is usually never small enough. They think if they're meeting friends for lunch or dinner how soon can they make it to a restroom alone after they've eaten? What excuses can they tell to avoid any sight of food? They can be so depressed sitting alone in their room they are perfectly content thinking about and studying their own body dreaming of how they can achieve perfection. Hours will pass just sitting in silence and you won't even notice or care because you are consumed by apathy. They can be overly dedicated and obsessed with working out to try and cope with their problem's with food and their bodies. After working in a treatment center for eating disorders and after continuous research on how to cope and change I just want to publicly stress the importance of your body and those around you. In my class we are studying the affect the media has on women in our culture and it is so sad. From each end of the spectrum in magazines, t.v., film, modeling, advertisements etc.. we see that in everything "slim is sexy". We are trained on dieting and knowing how many different types of surgeries there are out there. What if we didn't compare ourselves to today's standard in the world? I think women would be more confident, driven, have more ambition to attaining and accomplishing goals. Of course it's important to be healthy! We all need to take care of our bodies and have physical activity to be fit. It sais it all in the word of wisdom. But to what extent, which degree is too far? I had a best friend of mine tell me she couldn't even eat her birthday cake because she was getting a guilty feeling just looking at it. She said it was the strangest thing. She had never felt that way before. At that point all I could think to myself was NO! I can't let this happen to her. That's how every minute of every day was for me. Even buying one thing at the check out at the grocery store whether it was veggies or raisin bran I felt like a fatty and guilty just for buying food. We need to appreciate our bodies. We all look a little different and that is the beauty of life. Different shapes, sizes, heights and even our builds or completely different. In the Latin world as Alisa Valdes writes in "My hips, My Caderas" from the Contemporary Reader she talks about being half Cuban and half White. In the American white world she is judged for looking fat and not being a small enough size. Where as, in the Latin world men and women love her shape. In their culture and others hips are in. Women are valued for traditional roles of mother and caregiver and can dance the salsa and shake their booty. "In other cultures like {ours/mine} these roles, mother and caregiver have broken down and women try to be like men were in traditional societies-- i.e., have jobs- hips are out". It is so sad and disappointing to me how the world we live in portrays women. Having a family and children is just not important the media or world. They try to tell us that "beauty is happiness, the right labels mean success and the right look means acceptance". Our society is just so caught up in itself. I have had my dream career for seven years and now I'm back in school because I want to learn more. I think a driven woman who educates her self and attains an esteemed career is highly admirable. It is just so sad what the pressures of the world can do to do girls as young as I've seen is eleven and to women through out their lives. It's been proven that "U.S. residents are now exposed to 3,000 to 5,000 advertisements a day. As many per year as those living half a century ago". (C.R.) I just wish there was a way to change the views of magazines etc.. and the messages they send to men and women. This is something I feel seriously about. I could go on forever. Here are just a couple quotes that help strengthen me and maybe men and women out there. "I choose to live by choice, not by chance; to make changes, not excuses; to be motivated, not manipulated; to be useful, not used; to excel, not compete. I choose self-esteem, not self-pity. I choose to listen to the inner voice, not random opinions." Unknown "Why should we worry about what others think of us, do we have more confidence in their opinions than we do in our own?" Brigham young