You are amazing just the way you are not

Ava Hicks | Staff Writer

I am sick and tired of hearing people praise a girl for being curvy, only to turn around and berate them for being classified as slightly overweight on the absolutely ridiculous Body Mass Index scale.

Magazine covers in the checkout lines of every grocery store in America are painted with altered images of unrealistically thin models, yet often the contents contain articles celebrating natural and authentic body types.

These articles almost seem like a disclaimer—like the creators of the magazine are intentionally including these articles to appease the advocates of the recently popular movement against the portrayal of the perfect body in the media. In other words, the articles do not seem genuine and feel more like an attempt by the magazines to defend their deceitful cover photos.

Within the pages of these kinds of magazines and under the scrutiny of media all over the country, you just cannot win. If someone is slightly plump, they need to stop stuffing their face and hit the gym. If someone loses a little weight, they obviously have an eating disorder and are overly obsessed with appearance.

A study done by Media Smarts reported that looking at magazines for just 60 minutes lowers the self-esteem of more than 80 percent of girls. With numbers like this, it seems obvious that the images in most magazines do not have the consumer’s best interest in mind.

I am not saying that this is always the case. The Dove Real Beauty Campaign emerged in 2004, around the time when our society’s weight obsession started picking up. The campaign has the intention of helping women feel confident in their own skin and advocates the celebration and appreciation of different body types.

Movements like this have such a positive impact and help to balance out the radical viewpoints many individuals take on the cultural weight stigma. Instead of ridiculing people with some extra meat on their bones or shaming those who are naturally skinny, we need to focus on loving every single individual exactly the way they are.

When people think about issues concerning body image, most of the time the picture that pops into their mind is that of a woman. This is because of our society’s portrayal of women as sex symbols in the media and the unreasonable expectations that accompany the depiction.

That being said, it is not uncommon at all for men to struggle with being self-conscious about their weight. It is a very real and prevalent matter, yet is often neglected because of the fact that men are taught not to be sensitive and therefore are not as open to speaking up about the stigma.

No matter your gender, sex, race, religion, IQ or shoe size, it is absolutely unacceptable for anyone to be treated in such a way that they are made to feel like less of a person because of the shape and size of their body.

After all, our bodies are just vessels, right? They function to defend the internal things that make each of us who we uniquely are—our brain full of extraordinary thoughts and the light of our individually beautiful souls.