Why Am I Fat

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Why am I Fat ? Why am I Fat? , How is she so skinny? , Why am I ugly? , Why is she so pretty? These are questions our teens ask themselves every day. In today’s society there is a tremendous amount of pressure on our teenage girls to have the “perfect body”. They are confronted with images of the “perfect body” everyday on television, videos and in magazines. Why is body image important? Is it good to be aware of your body? Yes, but at what cost? Our teen girls are sacrificing their health and their bodies by extreme dieting, plastic surgery and/or developing an obsessive preoccupation with a particular body part(s) with the hope of one day having of the “perfect body”. There was time during the early to mid 1800’s when thin was not in and a fuller, more voluptuous figure was considered beautiful. However, the slimmer, more athletic-looking Gibson Girl, first created by artist Charles Dana Gibson, replaced it as the ideal 1890’s. Thinness has remained an integral of female attractiveness ever since. The Gibson Girl remained the image of American beauty until World War II, when the flapper became the vanguard of fashionableness, prompting the late Dr. Morris Fishbein, longtime editor of the Journal of the American Medical Association, to say, “Of all the fads which have affected mankind, none seems more difficult to explain than the desire of American women for the barberpole figure” (qtd.by Zimmerman) During the Great Depression of the 1930’s, the flapper lost her popularity; larger, stronger, more mature ideals superseded her “boyish form”. But after World War II, at the start of the baby boom, women’s magazines began promoting Christian Dior’s “New Look”, which demanded a hand-span waist with corsets, girdles, waist cinches, and diets were used to achieve that look. There were lots models even in the 1950’s and 60’s who went to extreme measures to maintain

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