Self Love is key

Hi everyone! I hope you have had a great couple of weeks and especially an awesome halloween! Tonight I am going to be talking about something that hits close to home for me and a lot of other people, especially girls. If you have any thoughts please feel free to comment or email me, (only nice or intellectual thought provoking comments are wanted. :-))

Body Image is "the way that someone perceives their body and assumes that others perceive them. This image is often affected by family, friends, social pressure and the media." As I started to research the topic I found a couple of  disturbing statistics. "Approximately 91% of women are unhappy with their bodies and resort to dieting to achieve their ideal body shape. Unfortunately, only 5% of women naturally possess the body type often portrayed by Americans in the media. 58% of college-aged girls feel pressured to be a certain weight." After reading those statistics I felt sick. Being healthy is one thing, but girls should not feel the pressure to look and be a certain way. When their are arguments over body image, most will usually bring up how unrealistic expectations of how a woman should look are portrayed daily through social media. The amount of photo shop and airbrushing that goes into these photos of women on the covers of magazines is unreal. And, the sad thing is that there are a lot of girls who look at these magazines, and social media representations and then look at themselves and become dissatisfied. But, what those little girls don't know is that even the people featured in those photos can not achieve that level of flawlessness. In my opinion, to be beautiful you don't have to be as skinny as they come, but if you are that's okay too. To me as cheesy as this is confidence and happiness are key. Beauty is in the eye of the beholder and everyone is going to think something different is beautiful, so why are we all striving to be the same? My point in bringing this topic up is to talk about how to feel good in you're own skin. If you think I have the answer to that I am going to inform you that I sadly don't. I wish I did, but I myself am still trying to find it. The only thing I know is that no matter how much weight I lost, or how much muscle I gained in the past, I still was not happy with my self. Working out and eating healthy does help you feel better and improves your physique, but it is not everything and I know for damn sure it does not solve all your problems like you think losing weight will do. Through my trials and errors of dealing with my poor body-image I now know that no matter how much the scale reads, how many compliments you receive, you do not feel any better until you accept yourself and love yourself. It comes from within. You can work out as much as you want and eat as well as you possibly can, and you can look like a damn princess and still not be happy. For me, I still have not processed that, and I definitely am still a work in progress, but I am trying. Instead of comparing my self to others without even realizing it, and standing in front of the mirror critiquing myself I am going to try, and have been trying to just not. I have been starting to workout more and get involved in more things that make me happy, and am hoping it will help. Also, I have noticed that some of the reason that boys and girls are both so self conscious is of what they expect the opposite sex to look like. Of course this is a huge generalization, but from articles by the name of "7 reasons you should date a girl with an eating disorder," and boys who girls look up to such as Nash Grier who say they love natural girls, and to not wear makeup but then proceed to say that peach fuzz and arm air are a big no, makes me realize why so many people are insecure at such an early age. Everyone expects something from everyone and it is setting society up in an unpleasant destructive way. We need to break the cycle. For more information please visit www.dosomething.org/facts/11-facts-about-body-image. All statistics were derived from dosomething.org
If you are struggling with an eating disorder, or feel like you are drowning in sadness over your body, I promise you are not alone.  Here are a few things you can do: a hotline for all issues regarding body image:18443350872, call a parent or a friend, get educated and reach out for help, you can visit dosomething.org and they can help for free and confidentially.
Please feel free to email me anytime. I hope this helps.
Taylor