Body Image: Assignment 2 Part 4

“Did you see her nose job?!” Teenage girls today are able to have surgery on just about anything that they may not like on their body. From boob jobs to lip injections you can get almost anything fixed for the right price. Teens are so concerned about their own looks and everybody else’s looks that they are willing to pay just about anything for the right change. Body image is sweeping the nation fast; it is becoming one of the most widely discussed topics in the media. Body image concerns is caused by media and peer pressure which affects a majority of teenage girls today as shown through higher than average diagnosis’s of anorexia and bulimia which lead to numerous health problems that can be avoided.
Body image is a very serious issue for teenage girls mainly. Although, many people don’t understand that body image is all psychological, meaning it is in their mind and that they are just mentally imagining their body looking different than it really looks. This kind of thinking can also lead to some strong dangerous emotions, leading to a very dangerous addiction. Body image can start anywhere from being insecure on how a person might look and feel or even just in the home where their parents may be criticizing them on how they look or even if anyone in their household is experiencing body image issues.
Girls usually start getting concerned on how their bodies are looking when they reach the high school level. There is so much peer pressure that is going on. If their peers and friends are looking great then they are going to want to look that way to. The media is not helping with this issue at all; they pay billions of dollars a year to make people feel bad about themselves. Magazines are where most teenage girls get the resources from; supermodels and actresses are a huge influence on how girls want to look today. Teenagers usually do not understand that these magazine companies are using computers to crop and use photo shop to edit a photo to look completely different. The companies advertising only care about how much of the product they can sell to their audience not the effect that the ad might have on them. This has taken a huge toll on how younger girls are looking at and judging themselves.
Body image gets people thinking on what they could change to make them look better, and the first thing that people usually result to is surgery. Surgery is one of the highest ranked problem solvers, for someone that wants to change something about their self. Surgery also comes with many risks, some examples are swelling of the body, complications with medication they have been given and infections that might occur after the surgery is over. There are also certain activities that one cannot participate in while the healing process is in effect, this way the stitches can heal and your body has time to adjust to the change. Although plastic surgery risks are small and complications with it are less than one half percent surgeries are still very risky, especially for a high school student.
Anorexia and Bulimia are also some harmful illnesses that people come across when they are worried about how they look. These are the more common illnesses for a teenager, because they are easy to cover up. Anorexia is an eating disorder where people starve themselves. These people have a serious fear of gaining weight; anorexia causes people to not want to eat in public and not eat large amounts of food in one helping. People with this disease can start to hear voices in their head and they usually give this voice an identity, its own name. It is the most deadly of all the psychological disorders. On average a person is suppose to consume 2,500 calories a day a person who is anorexic consumes around 150 calories a day. Bulimia is also a dangerous eating disorder where people binge followed by purging. This disorder is usually a response to depression, stress or self esteem issues, usually the individual will experience loss of control over their own body. These two eating disorders are very unsafe, unhealthy and can lead to death. These eating disorders are usually very addicting once they have been formed they are not easy to stop the habit on binging, purging, or not eating regular meals.
Having issues with body image can also be prevented. Someone that is insecure about how their body looks may diet regularly and avoid eating. They may not know that skipping meals is no help to them at all, it just ends up slowing down your metabolism and your body absorbs more calories than they would have originally taken in. Some other ways that they can keep from gaining weight and keep their body healthy is eating three meals a day, especially breakfast also known as the most important meal of the day- because that is the meal that gives you energy for the whole day. Drinking at least sixty-four ounces of water a day is also very helpful and healthy this will keep a person hydrated while avoiding caffeine and alcohol. Taking a multi vitamin daily will make sure you are getting all your vitamins that you need for the day. Teenagers should also make sure they are exercising daily, to speed up their metabolism which will also keep them in shape.
There are many ways to prevent people from viewing their bodies in negative ways. Staying healthy is just one of them, and plastic surgery is just a way of covering up their possible flaws that they do not want people to notice. Hopefully in the future body image around the high school level will not be such a big deal. Teenagers already have a lot of things to worry about at that age and self appearance shouldn’t be one of them.

Work Cited Page
Witmer, Denis. “Parenting of Adolescents.” Does your daughter have a healthy body image?
Valeso, Bryan. “Teen girls diets.” The body image antidote for teenage girls 2007, 36