Ok, so lately I've been struggling with my body image. I'm not sure where these lame thoughts came from, but I don't like feeling this way. I work out at least four days per week for an hour or more, and I eat healthy. There's no reason for me to have these thoughts about myself. After researching the issue, I've realized that a lot of women have these feelings. In fact, eight out of ten women are dissatisfied with their bodies. That's almost 90% of all women! I also read that of the women who are of average weight, 10% of those women want to weigh what would be classified as underweight. They also say that out of those women who are dissatisfied with their appearance, over half are seeing a distorted view of themselves. 80% of women who look in the mirror see themselves as bigger than they really are. I once watched a show on TV, I forgot what it was, and they had a group of 10-15 women dressed in the same outfit. They had one woman choose which woman she thought most closely resembled her body. They always chose a woman who was larger. One woman, who was a size 8, even chose a woman who was a size 14! I think that just proves how distorted some of our views of ourselves are. Men have body image issues too, but it's not as common as women. I do think that women are judged based on their image more than men. A man can walk around over-weight, and still be attractive. But for a woman to walk around slightly over-weight, society doesn't deem her attractive anymore. Just think about it, beautiful women are everywhere, most of them are not all natural. We see them everywhere, billboards, TV, movies, the mall, etc. It's proven that young girls see more images of beautiful women in one day than our mother's saw throughout their entire adolescence. Did you know Marilyn Monroe was a size 14? She was a complete sex symbol in her day. In 1917, the ideal woman was 5'4" and weighed 140 pounds! It has become increasingly less. Even 25 years ago, the ideal woman only weighed 8% less than the average woman. Now? They weigh 25% less than the average woman. The current media ideal for a woman is only achievable by less than 5% of the population, and that's just the size. But if you want the height and weight, it's less than 1%. Less than 1% of the female population is able to achieve the "perfect" look, according to media. A fact I found: A 15 minute exposure to a fashion magazine will decrease a woman's satisfaction with her body image by 50%. They've also done recent studies and found that a woman's exposure to magazine pictures of super thin models produces depression, stress, guilt, shame, insecurity, body-dissatisfaction and increased endorsement of the thin-ideal stereotype. Vogue and Elle are actually banned in many eating disorder clinics. It has also been shown that women with eating disorders think their actual body size has increased after eating a chocolate bar or soft drink. Some even think this after eating a high-calorie lunch or snack. An estimated 1,000 women die each year from anorexia. This number is way too high. I could go on forever about this. But I wanted to talk to on some things I found about air brushing!

I just posted this picture to show you how dramatic it really is. We look at this girl in a magazine, and we think she's perfect, and try our hardest to look like her. We are all perfect the way we are, God made us how he wanted us to be. If we were all supposed to look the same, He would've made us that way. Why do we go by what the media wants? They want someone who is pretty much impossible to get to, someone who's bones are sticking out, and who's unhealthy, and fake! They show us these pictures of fake women, who are air brushed, and we fall into their trap that they're real. We look in the mirror and see a normal body, we all have flaws, but we forget that every single woman in the entire world has those flaws. We forget that the flawless women in magazines and on TV are fake, that their flaws are just being covered up. I want to show you this picture too. Marilyn Monroe was considered perfect in the 1950's, and now look at the "perfect" woman.

Anyway, I'm just going to post a few more pictures on airbrushing, just so you can see the before and after, and the huge differences in their bodies. Sorry about the long post, I just think we've had enough of the media telling us how our bodies should be.

And your beloved Victoria's Secret models before airbrushing...

Anyway. I know this was a long post, but it's something that's been bothering me. I hope this helps anyone who is struggling like me!