Fitting into school and your body
High school is a social playground. Students roam the hallways, looking at the other students comparing themselves to the “pretty” students and the ones with “perfect bodies”. It’s quite easy to look at the other students and compare yourself, downgrading your own worth and value just because you don’t look like them.
In high school, “fitting in” is thought of to be the best thing you could do. Being one of the “cool kids” is something students often long for, but that longing leads to dangerous consequences and habits.
These desires all come from the mentality of the students. We think “I want to fit in”, but how do we actually “fit in”? We have to change. We have to change ourselves and the way that our bodies look in order to look like the other students. But what can we change? “I have to lose weight,” or “I have to eat less.”
This thought process leads to strict diets, starvation, and eating disorders. In fact, 62.3% of teenage girls and 28.8% of teenage boys report trying to lose weight. Eating, treating yourself, and enabling your body to survive by consuming the right nutrients is now turned into a fear; a fear of gaining weight and not having the body that society tells you to have.
Being positive and confident about yourself and your body can help you to be healthy and create a good relationship with food. Words of affirmation, “I am loved” “I am me” “I am unique and perfect,” are good things that we can say to ourselves to help reinforce the idea that we don’t have to compare ourselves to others. We are us and we are unique yet perfect in our own ways.
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