How I Overcame Negative Body Image

As a child, I grew up playing with Barbie and other dolls with very anatomically disproportionate bodies.

As I got older, I watched beautiful women with tiny frames and gravity-defying breasts filling my television screen.

Home and Away, Neighbours and reality TV shows like Australia's Next Top Model seemed to imprint in my and many other young girls' minds that to be fulfilled one must be beautiful and skinny.

Now, in 2015, our society is heading towards an online world different to the one I grew up with as a child. Social media exists beyond the confines of relics like MySpace or MSNchat. Celebrities and regular people can interact online and upload content like snaps of their day to day life. It can thus be a confusing time to be young and dealing with body image.

Bodies on magazine covers, billboards, movies, music videos and social media seem different to the bodies of real teenagers and young adults across Australia. Many people are aware now that the images we see of celebrities and models are digitally manipulated to make the celebrities look more perfect than what the celebrity could ever look like in real life. However, this doesn't stop the desire to emulate the images we see across the media. Instead, young women and men want to be as perfect.

For example, over the years I have watched several friends undergo radical changes to their bodies through diet and exercise. Unfortunately, these changes were not necessarily positive and in my opinion were signs of disordered eating. I watched my friends take selfies for Instagram and Facebook of their body transformations, and over the course of months their bodies became skinnier and more frail looking.

Their "healthy" eating and over-exercising became unsustainable and, thankfully, most of my friends changed their habits in a more positive direction. However, a few remain obsessive with both their diets and exercise to the point of using scales to measure their daily food intake in grams.

I think social (and conventional) media plays a large role in determining how women and men value their looks. Unfortunately, this is not always positive because for many young women and men, they determine their self-worth through their bodies rather than their achievements.

I cannot say that I have come away completely unscathed by the images I see of beautiful celebrities. For many years, I too wanted to look like a model. I wanted longer legs, a flatter stomach and a cuter nose. I have overcome my negative body image by appreciating what my body can do. Every day I wake up and breathe is another day I am thankful my body does what it should. My body is a vehicle which I use to convey ideas through writing, art and music.

My body allows me to appreciate and take in the world around me. So far, my body works just as it should and I am healthy. I ask myself, if I am working as I should, do I need to be more beautiful? Do I need a flatter stomach? I realised long ago to value myself for something greater than how good I look in a pair of jeans. I can have value as a person without being a model. It is up to me as an individual to realise that while keeping healthy is important, I don't need to be a size four to be healthy. Instead, I learned to appreciate all that my body could do and finally overcame my negative body image.

Congratulations to Charlene for winning this writing challenge, answering: How I Overcame Negative Body Image. Charlene wins a $50 Westfield gift card. For your chance to win, check out our latest writing challenges in our Comps section. Also, be sure to follow this guide on how to win the writing challenge!