The plight to be perfect—the perils of body image and teens

“I’m fat. I don’t eat … I hate myself … I want to die.”

Under this message scrawled in the band quad bathroom, somebody else had written, “God made you beautiful and know that. Jesus loves you because you are perfect in his eyes. You’re wonderful, don’t forget it.”

Several more messages in the thread, scrawled onto a toilet paper roll in the band quad’s girls’ bathroom, read similarly: “Trust me, we all have a distorted view on ourselves. Chin up, beautiful.” The girls had somehow found a chain of unity in anonymous words of encouragement, tucked into this seemingly insignificant thread that depicts a much larger-scale issue.

Even inside the so-called “Saratoga Bubble,” students still feel the pressure to attain the publicly accepted image of “perfect.”

The ever-present pressure for girls to be thin and beautiful is continually increasing, and the deadly results are skyrocketing. Statistics from the South Carolina Department of Mental Health show that almost 80 percent of girls by age 13 have attempted to diet, 9 percent of 9-year-olds admit to vomiting to lose weight and 50 percent of girls age 11 to 13 see themselves as overweight.

For girls, common eating disorders include anorexia nervosa, bulimia nervosa and binge eating. Anorexia is characterized by the obsessive fear of being overweight, which results in under-eating, sometimes to the point of starvation. Bulimia involves the uncontrolled eating of large amounts of food, which the person will later binge, or purge their bodies of the food via laxatives or forcefully throwing up the food.

Despite all the support programs for youths, only one in 10 people with eating disorders receives treatment.

Sophomore Maggie Sun feels that these horrifying statistics are a result of people’s instinctive longing to be socially accepted.

“I think it comes from not wanting to be different. If you’re chubby, you’re made fun of, so people stay skinny to be like everyone else,” Sun said.

Teen author Lucy Howard-Taylor, who wrote “Biting Anorexia,” almost met death several years ago after battling the disorder. According to Howard-Taylor, eating disorders represent something much more significant than a result of vain girls attempting to lose weight.

“This isn’t about weight, or a diet, or a figure,” she wrote. “Somewhere along the line I’ve come to equate fat with failure and weakness. Weight loss is merely symptomatic of the greater psychological problem.”

She claims that the real problem is the longing to fit in and to be accepted by the general public.

Girls are not the only ones to feel this pressure; more and more teenage boys are becoming victims as well. Although only ten percent of people who battle eating disorders are men, the number is slowly rising. At any given time, 25 percent of men are dieting.

“Guys are definitely affected by their stereotypical image,” sophomore Jason Li said. “Of course all of us want to be buff and strong, but not all of us want to work for it.”

However, men’s battles with insecurities do not commonly result in anorexia or bulimia, since their goal is usually to bulk up rather than slim down.

“Guys aren’t afraid to be big—sure we’d rather be ripped, but guys are usually like, ‘Oh I’m 300 pounds, nobody messes with me,’” Li said. “So we don’t really care if we’re heavy.”

Apart from the girl-dominated disorders of anorexia of bulimia, Li claims that guys still fall prey to stereotypes, though it does not come up in the spotlight as often. Such pressures include being fit and muscular, good-looking, and having the latest trend of clothes.

“I used to only have one pair of shoes at a time. I wore Styrofoam slippers I got from a hotel to school everyday for all of elementary school,” said Li. “I always knew TV had commercials about new Nike Airs or Jordans or Reeboks, but I never really cared.”

But once Li reached high school, the his friend’s ridiculing finally got to him.

“People noticed I only had one pair of shoes so I decided to actually get some real sneakers. I now have three pairs of shoes, [but] if it wasn’t for my friends, I might still only wear one pair of slippers to school,” Li said.

Either way, the ways in which people try to attain perfection are endless, but the much healthier alternative is to accept one’s imperfections.

According to Jeanne Segal, an expert in eating disorders, many who struggle with the problem have an “inner voice that whispers that you’ll never be happy until you lose weight, that your worth is measured by how you look.” These voices are often the hardest to defeat in the process of recovery from anorexia and bulimia.

Whether it be the life-threatening conditions of eating disorders or pressures dealing with image, the first step in dealing with them is to accept yourself for who you are.

“The first thing to do is recognize that your body is your own, no matter what shape, size, or color it comes in,” body image expert D’Arcy Lyness said. “It’s no one’s business but your own what your body is like— ultimately, you have to be happy with yourself.”