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
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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!