The Negative Body Image

Body image is the way you see yourself and imagine how you look. Having a positive body image means that, most of the time, you see yourself accurately, you feel comfortable in your body, and you feel good about the way you look. A poor body image can cause many negative psychological and physical effects. With the image portrayed in the media, it has made self confidence harder to find. While the media shows unrealistic types of women it gives girls an unrealistic idealization of what they think that they should be. Body imagine is also affected by peers, as teens develop. Many children get made fun of and picked on in schools because of their looks, weight and height. All these scenarios lead children and teens to believe that they are not

The person could feel ashamed, self-conscious, and anxious about their body. A positive body image is a clear perception of their shape they see the various parts of their body as they really are. Positive body image Celebrates your natural body shape and they understand that a person’s physical appearance says very little about their character and value as a person. One should feel comfortable and confident in their body (NEDA, 2016). Negative body images can start as early as elementary school. Kids as young as four think their ideal weight is thinner than their current weight. By age four, children want to be thin. Young children are already thinking they need to be skinnier, to look better. Forty percent of six year olds have also indicated that they have tried to lose weight, that being said by age 7, one in four children have engaged in some kind of dieting behavior (Greve, 2016). While both girls and boys are struggling with body image, girls experience this issue much more. By age 12, many girls won’t risk exposing their bodies to anyone. For example, girls may not want to go to a public swimming pool or change for gym class,

“Together, Americans spend 250 billion hours watching television every year. According to the California State University at Northridge, advertising accounts for about 30 percent of all television air time. The average child watches 20,000 television commercials every year (Mirror-Mirror, 2016). Television is not the only place we see advertisements. Popular magazines and women’s magazines and many teen’s magazines, are filled with ads. We even see pop-up ads online. The media and body image are closely related due to the number of images we see in the media and the excessive amount of exposure we have to those images. Although advertising aims to convince us to buy things, ads very rarely portray people that look like us. The average female fashion model wears a size two or four, for instance, while the average American woman wears a size 12 to 14 (Mirror-Mirror, 2016). Clothing designers often say they only use very thin models because the clothes simply look better on them. Photos of models in print ads are often “touched up” in order to disguise minor flaws or make the model appear even skinnier than she really is. These “false body image” ads, shows us bodies that are not real at all or that are not very realistic or representative of the general population. Again this lead to children believing they should look like the far fetched models