What Is Body Image – Part 2 - Health Plus Digest

In today’s media driven culture women are starving themselves and their children, binge eating or binging and purging in order to meet this perfect ideal. Children are watching their parents closely to learn what body image is and how to integrate it into their own lives. When children are learning from parents whose body image is closely tied to what they see as perfection it results in raising a generation of children who aspire to perfection to the point that they become anorexic, starve themselves, constantly diet and never eat a nutritious well-balanced meal.

Especially in the teen years, younger individual’s self-esteem is closely related to their body image and self perception. Self-esteem is how much value a person places upon themselves, their pride and how worthwhile they feel. Body image is often tied to self-esteem in young teenage women.

Individuals who desire to change their body image and self-perceptions do not need to change the way they look, feel, act or live. Instead they must change the way they think about themselves and how attractive they believe themselves to be. Each of us are individuals. We cannot duplicate the current top model and they cannot duplicate us. The first step for individuals who want to change their body image is to be sure that the weight is within healthy limits by checking with their primary care physician or trusted friend. The final step is to learn to appreciate the diversity that we bring to the human race with our own individual interpretation of our bodies. For instance, we cannot change the size of our feet or our shoe size but if we feel our legs are too flabby we can go to the gym for a few hours a week.

The real goal in altering your body image must always be health. Whether an individual is trying to attempt to achieve a healthy weight or a healthy toned body, the goal must be to achieve good health. When you eventually take your eyes off of the half starved, liposuction, surgically enhanced television stars you’ll realize that your body is an individual and is beautiful. When you hear yourself saying negative things to yourself – STOP! You can be your own worst enemy or your own biggest fan. Choose to be your biggest fan.