What is the issue?

Do you personally know someone that struggles with an eating disorder? Have you ever felt dissatisfied with your body? If you have answered "yes" to any of these questions- you are not alone. Some of these statistics show how much of a problem exists with unhealthy body image:

• Almost 54 percent of American girls and women aged 12 to 23 years old are unhappy with their bodies
  
  
• One-third of high school students thought they were overweight when they were not
  
  
• Roughly 75 percent of girls as young as 9 years old have dieted from 2 to 5 times in a given year
  
  
• At any given time, 5 to 10 million women and girls have eating disorders that harm their health, including anorexia nervosa and bulimia
• 
  

Do these numbers shock you as much as they do me? What is the cause of such dissatisfaction, especially among young women, with their bodies? Could it be the media? We might just be standing in the grocery store check-out line, flipping through the pages of "People" magazine- or maybe we are sitting down after a long day at school or work to watch our favorite tv show; whatever the case, chances are that we have already been flooded by images and photos of thin and beautiful women. We are exposed to seeing these skinny figures day in and day out on billboards, in ads, or on television; it is no wonder then, that our young girls and really all women everywhere start to feel that in order to be "beautiful" you have to be thin.
My goal is to build more awareness of this issue: many women have an unhealthy perception of their body that does impact how they think, how they feel, and how they act. Maybe we know a sister, a daughter or a friend who suffers with this, but we can help. It is time that we make the women in our lives feel BEAUTIFUL!

First Things First...

I have been thinking a lot about what I wanted to say for my first post on my blog about body image.  To be honest, I have been putting it off for as long as I could; not because I was procrastinating this assignment, but rather, I wanted to have some handle on what exactly I wanted the tone of this page to be.  This is the first blog that I have ever created, and I feel the need to write something that will be meaningful.  I am a 23 year old student attending BYU.  I walk the campus each day, and am surrounded by beautiful and intelligent people.  I feel very lucky to be at such a competitive and challenging school; but at the same time, being at a university filled with so many gifted and bright people, it is easy to compare yourself to others and their talents and their successes while minimizing your own. The tendency to compare oneself to another is as old as the story found in the Bible of Cain and Able, and so it is no new concept.  However, comparing ourselves to others does greatly influence our self-perception, and there can be some benefits to doing that;  but generally, it can be damaging to one's self esteem.  So with that very long introduction, my purpose is to broach the subject of body image, and hopefully shed some ideas of how we can help others, especially young woman, to love their bodies.