Living in a world where looks seem to overrule any other trait a person has can have an abhorrent effect on adolescents and young children.

According to the website “Eating Disorder Hope,” around 50% of teenage females and 33% of teenage boys use intense and restrictive strategies to lose weight. This only shows that there are millions of teenagers throughout the United States who are insecure about their body image.

Your body image is how you see or imagine your own physical features, and having a good body image determines your contentment. Body image is often confused with self-esteem, which is how you feel about yourself as a whole, including your persona and characteristics.

As stated by the NEDA (National Eating Disorder Association), the number of new cases involving developing or occurring eating disorders have been increasing since 1950. A major component of people falling into an eating disorder can often be a result of new, strict beauty and social standards that have advanced in our society.

An eating disorder can begin when somebody wants to lose weight, and becomes extremely obsessed with meeting the “perfect image” that is set out for teenagers or young adults. People who want to shed pounds want it done quickly and easily, and one awfully unhealthy way to do so is to eat notably less and to excessively exercise to a point where it harms your own body.

As people go through with this putrid form of weight loss, food or calories become the enemy to the thin body they desperately want. One extremely common eating disorder, known as anorexia nervosa, can be tragically deadly, and this dangerous disorder’s side effects include loss of bone density, kidney failure, and extreme fatigue and/or physical weakness.

Eating disorders have the highest mortality rate out of any other mental illness, which only portrays how much of a serious problem they really are. If we constantly have the need to be perfect or to meet society’s view of someone who is beautiful, then it can never get better.

Only one in ten people suffering from an eating disorder actually get treated for it, and that means that there are millions of adolescents undergoing traumatic ordeals with no help. As a public domain filled with people of all sizes, shapes, and colors, we need to be more open-minded about our image of what a beautiful person is.

Nobody should have to change the way he or she physically look in order to feel as if one fits into society’s version of what an attractive person looks like.