29-May-2024

A while ago, I joined a group of Mental Health Youth Ambassadors, and I’ve really been liking my time there. The program I’m part of is where different groups of people make presentations on various mental health aspects. My group’s presentation is about beauty standards and how social media provokes in people. To kick things off, we start with going over the agenda, followed by an icebreaker that introduces the topic of our presentation. The icebreaker consists of two questions we get to ask the audience: What does their body do for them, and why they think we only reduce our body’s value to just its appearance. The main answer to how body standards affect us is that we begin to adapt the standards at the expense of our body and our mental health. A few real-life examples of this taking place are extreme dieting, disturbed body image and body dysmorphia, eating disorders, and having a fixed appearance. Eating disorders are common in many adolescents and even some adults, so part of the presentation was to explain how you can prevent eating disorders. You can do this by establishing healthy eating habits, being on the lookout for potential signs, not criticizing others’ appearance or weight, and discussing foods in terms of how healthy they are, not how ‘good’ or ‘bad’ they are. Social media is no help to these increasing beauty standards. It bombards us with images of people with ‘perfect’ bodies and causes us to compare ourselves to those people to try and become more seemingly perfect, thus dissatisfying us with our own appearance. Additionally, many photos online aren’t even of the raw, authentic person; much of what people post of themselves online is edited to give them a fake image of how they look. The goal of this presentation is to start normalizing all body types that people have. You should celebrate and love your body the way it is. You shouldn’t exercise to change your appearance; you should do it to take care of your body. You should understand that bodies come in all shapes and sizes. Because after all, beauty is beyond the surface.