Saturday, April 9, 2016

Positive image, self love important

By Emily Kim

A human’s body is a genetically made up structure that is unique only to that one

person. It’s something that you are born with and taking care of it should be a lifetime

job. However, with the media and the culture portraying how women should look like,

body image is becoming more damaging and evident in young women, now with girls

under the age of 10.

Body image awareness has been more prominent in the last couple of years

because of the increase in girls who are becoming anorexic and having health related

problems. Anorexia is the most common cause of death among young women ages 15-

24. It is an illness that many people are aware of, but it is something that many people do

not recognize as serious of a problem due to societal influences and cultural factors.

“Anywhere you go really there’s some reference to appearance, and now

appearance is being sold as the answer to happiness,” said Portia Turco, a Lecturer in

Council Education and Psychologist.

With the enormous amount of technological availability, young girls can be

persuaded and influenced easier than ever on how their bodies should look. Social media,

magazines, music videos, and celebrities all take a part into the way culture obsesses over

a women’s body.

Lindsey Cook, a student at SUNY Plattsburgh, said, “I think a lot of it has to do

with the media and how they look up to girls who have stick thin figures and they think

that’s what beauty is.”

Social media is hard to ignore, and culturally, girls are subjected to judge others

and themselves when it comes to the way their bodies look. It becomes a force of habit

when girls see only beautiful celebrities and models with the same type of body figure on

the Internet and television.

Jaclyn Mariotti, a personal trainer, said, “I think that girls should focus more on

their health rather than what they look like and rather than trying to be perfect.”

However, body image is harder to surpass than with just words. 90-95% of

females experience an eating disorder, 50% of girls 11-13 years of age see themselves as

overweight, and 80% of 13-year-olds have attempted to lose weight.

Statistics are high in young-teen girls, “we used to think that it was more

adolescent girls but we are seeing it in middle school, and we know that by the third

grade, young girls are body aware,” said Turco.

A British study in 2001 states that on average, 1.5 in every 200,000 British

children under 10-years-old have anorexia, 40% of nine-year-olds diet, and four to five-

year-olds feel the need to diet.

Ilene Leshinsky, a Licensed Clinical Social Worker and creator of Body Sense,

said, “they unfortunately hear their mothers and sisters talk about being fat or feeling fat,

and they’re absorbing these messages from the culture at large along with their families

and friends.”

Leshinsky created a program for women in conflict with weight, eating and body

image. She believes that she can help other women struggling with these issues because

she has struggled with them herself.

“I had run the gametes of the diets and the craziness, the binging, never purging,

but the starving and that rollercoaster ride until I was in my mid thirties,” said Leshinsky.

Body sense was created not to focus on dieting or someone else’s way of losing

weight, but to find our individual ways to become stronger and healthier by exploring our

relationship with our bodies.

But when girls as young as the age of five start developing concerns of being fat,

it takes more than just talking and telling them that they are beautiful just the way they

“If we are dealing with children we’re dealing with their families, and families

need to get involved,” said Leshinsky.

Children this young do not develop issues with body image on their own. They

are absorbing and listening to people around them talk about their bodies and other

women’s bodies in negative ways, putting an expectation or pressure on these girls at an

extremely young age to look a certain way.

“The family can be this incredible buffer between the media and the culture and

the child who could succumb a life threatening illness,” said Leshinsky.

The way society stresses and promotes women’s bodies’ needs to change in order

for girls to think less of what they look like and more of how healthy they are.

“Eat healthy and exercise, but also don’t stop eating those bad things that you

enjoy, because then I feel like that’s when it starts to become a problem, just moderate

it,” said Cook.

Body image is a societal issue that has been embedded into the consciousness of

young women. The cultural behavior is destroying the mindsets of these women;

meanwhile, they should believe that their bodies are all different and beautiful in their

own unique ways.

“We have to focus on sending positive messages to the little ones that beauty

comes in all shapes and sizes and the primary point is health and well being,” said

Leshinsky.

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