Let’s face it, we are our own worst critic. We create expectations for ourselves and find that people are most hard on themselves when it comes to how they perform certain tasks, or when it comes to their appearance. This article, Body Image Concerns Hardwired Into Women’s Brains, got me thinking about what the definition of beautiful is to women in the U.S.  In this country, some of the most beautiful women in the world are Angelina Jolie, Adriana Lima, or Heidi Klum. These women all have long luxurious hair, perfect skin, strong features, and very thin, between a size zero or four. You won’t find other gorgeous women who are more voluptuous making the list like Jennifer Hudson or Queen Latifah. “To be an American woman and feel good about your body requires a powerful inner strength and the will to resist an unrealistically skinny social ideal.” Society has ingrained into our minds that if you’re skinny, then you’re considered beautiful.

I wasn’t surprised to find that women who are already naturally thin, are still concerned about their weight. Mark Allen, who is a neuroscientist at Brigham Young University, says that “most women are teetering on the edge of an eating disorder.” To prove this, the following test was conducted:

“Allen and colleagues looked into hidden feelings about body image by using fMRI machines to scan the brains of 10 healthy women. The women were thin, but all had passed eating disorder screening tests with flying colors. So, theoretically, they felt just fine with their bodies.

While hooked up to brain scanners, the women looked at images of avatar-like models in skimpy bikinis: some overweight, some skinny. With each image, the women were told to imagine that someone else was saying the model looked like her.

When overweight images popped up, the medial prefrontal cortex lit up in all of the women, the scientists reported in the journal Personality and Individual Differences. Simply imagining that they might be overweight seemed to make the women question their sense of self, even though they claimed afterward that the test was boring or meaningless.”

It’s strange for us to think that hundreds of years ago, women who were a size 8 or bigger, were praised and set the standard of what was considered beautiful. When did we choose to sway away from this and preach that thin is in? It’s scary to think that “based on the new results, it now appears that there is a finer line between women with and without eating disorders than scientists previously suspected,” and that just one trigger statement can set off an eating disorder.

As a former gymnast, I have learned that if you want to excel in the sport, you have to already be naturally thin, strong, and flexible. Fortunately, this wasn’t a problem for me and I was able to consume whatever foods I wanted to. I remember a couple teammates of mine had to watch what they ate, and every so often make a comment that they couldn’t eat one more slice of pizza or piece of cake because they were fat. The problem with this is, we were only about 11 or 12 years old. When I got older, I became a gymnastics instructor and almost all of my colleagues were very thin. There was one colleague in particular who was at least 10 years older than me with a 3 year old daughter. I remember her saying that at my age, when she was 18 years old, she weighed 95 lbs. And even though she was pushing 30 and weighing between 105 and 110, thought she was fat and needed to lose more weight. Everyone has their own definitely of healthy, but if you’re eating a lot less and not getting all of the proper nutrients you need to make sure you’re body is functioning properly, then there’s a problem.

As a society, we need to set a precedence and push people to live a healthier lifestyle. We shouldn’t strive to be abnormally thin like the celebrities we see on television, because everyone’s body is different. Live your life, eat healthy, exercise regularly, and treat your body like a temple.