Without a doubt, millions of young women and girls all over the world are obsessed with having the perfect body and it’s killing them. Literally. Teenage girls are starving themselves into the grave and shoving their fingers down their throats until they are nothing but walking skeletons. Who’s to blame for this? Well, the answer is quite simple. Celebrities and the media.

Of course, everyone wants to look and feel like a supermodel, but the reality of it is that it’s extremely unhealthy and many of these “supermodels” look nothing like what the media portrays them to be.

Now, young women all over the world are struggling with body image, self-esteem, and eating disorders all because they are comparing themselves to promiscuous pictures of women all over the internet who have had so much plastic surgery and Photoshop that they don’t even look like real people. An 18-year- old girl named Hannah Carpenter went as far as committing suicide after she tried to imitate celebrity pictures on the internet. Although Hannah had battled with an eating disorder in her early teenage years, it was believed that she had “recovered” from it. Unfortunately, it’s now obvious that she still had serious body image and self-confidence issues. On an even more depressing note, Hannah was not the only one who struggled with body image. 1 in 200 American women suffer from anorexia. 3 in 100 American women suffer from bulimia. As many as 10% of college women suffer from a clinical or nearly clinical eating disorder.

At this point, we should be lifting women up! We should teach young girls to love themselves for who they are and not to compare themselves to anyone else. However, it is hard to teach our girls to love themselves when celebrities like Kylie Jenner getting all kinds of plastic surgery to completely rearrange their faces and bodies they look nothing like themselves. The media is teaching young girls that you are not beautiful until you look plastic and fake. From lip injections, to Botox, to fake breast implants, and even fake butt implants, celebrities are setting unreachable standards for women all over the world. People like Kylie Jenner are saying that anytime you don’t like something about yourself, just stick some needles or implants on to your body and that you’re not “hot” until you look like a walking Barbie doll. Well here’s what I have to say about that; buzz off! America needs to teach young women to stop caring so much about what others think and to realize that everyone is beautiful for who they are.

So ladies, next time you look in the mirror tell yourself that you are beautiful and learn to love yourself for who you are. Next time you are skipping lunch at school because you want to get that “hourglass figure” or shoving your finger down your throat for that “summer bod”, ask yourself “Is risking my health really worth all this?” Everyone is beautiful in their own way, so don’t pay attention to the media’s ridiculous standards because they simply aren’t realistic! Take pride in your health and well-being because if I had to choose between a deadly size zero or a healthy size 10, I’d definitely pick the size 10. No number is worth going six feet under.