It seems like on every magazine cover, every commercial and every billboard there is a new fad diet with a stick thin, beautiful model letting us know that we, too, can have rock hard abs in 10 days if we follow her daily routine or purchase a pill and participate in a juice cleanse. I’m not going to lie, growing up surrounded by all these crash diets, I have given into the schemes and the gimmicks and have always failed the diets. Afterward, I would feel like a failure and fall back into my old eating habits and gain all the weight back. I’ve grown since then and have realized that diets are not maintainable, and I’m miserable when attempting to follow them and restricting certain food groups for what? To possibly have abs and reach an aesthetic that is actually unhealthy long term?

It disgusts me that young girls and boys are growing up being told that their body isn’t good enough. The average bodyweight for the American woman ages 20 and older is 166.2 pounds, but the models on magazines barely look to be over 100 pounds. That body type is not attainable for the average American woman. We are extremely impressionable, and with all the outside resources surrounding us, it’s easy to feel like we aren’t good enough. We can always be skinnier, prettier, better than what we are; this is how eating disorders start. It’s hard to come out of an eating disorder, and most often times you develop body dysmorphia where you see yourself as bigger than what you actually are. Body fat is essential for humans, especially women. Once you start losing weight at an extremely fast pace, your entire body shuts down. Women may stop their periods, have heart issues and disintegrate the lining in their stomach.

We need to teach women and men and all of society to stop body shaming one another, and appreciate the bodies that we have. Everyone has rolls when they bend over or slouch, you won’t go to bed as thin as you were when you woke up and that’s OK; that’s natural. Get comfortable with yourself in the mirror, love yourself, take care of yourself. Tell yourself every day that you deserve to be happy. You can overeat some days and not exercise, you can also eat super healthy and exercise another day. Life is about balance and about living. Stop paying attention to what the model on the magazine says and live your life the way you want because life is going to happen even if you don’t have abs.