Guest blogger Irene Roth

Hi everyone — I’m excited to present a friend of mine, Irene Roth, who is my guest blogger today. If you have adolescent girls in your family (or if you are one!)  be sure to read this!

Now here’s Irene…

Is Thin Really the New Happy?
Irene S. Roth
July 1st, 2010

Hi, my name is Irene Roth and I have an adolescent girls blog at
www.adolescentgirlsblog.wordpress.com.  It is so nice to be here
as a guest at my friend Evelyn’s blog. I hope to blog once or twice
a month. I am SO looking forward to letting you know where my
thoughts are leading me about adolescent girls and how I could
help them to lead happy, stress-free and self-fulfilled lives.

One of my main goals in my blogs and through my E-books is
to teach girls how to love themselves unconditionally and not to
buy into the media image of beauty because this is usually a recipe
for unhappiness and discontent in their lives. The road to
happiness for girls is to develop and practice self-love and self-
acceptance. This is very hard to achieve in today’s media culture
where appearances are all that really matter for girls.

Adolescent girls want to belong more than anything else and at
any cost. This is part of the nature of adolescence, but the media
doesn’t help any matters either. Many girls become bulimic at
some point in their teen years in the pursuit of slimness. Some
girls get very depressed, and this is especially the case if they
cannot become as slim as they should be according to the media.

One of the main difficulties that I see with this yardstick of
impossibility for girls is that they become very unhappy because
of their constant struggle with their attempt at thinness. Add to
this that our culture’s definition of slimness is very healthy, and
we have a recipe for real problems for teen girls.

I believe that thin should not be the new happy. Thin is just a
toxic metaphor for girls to unreflectively accept in order to
conform to our culture’s idea of what is ideal beauty. But notice it
is ‘ideal’ beauty that the media portrays but not true and genuine
beauty a beauty that is unique to each individual girl.

‘Ideal’ beauty can only occur for a few already naturally skinny
girls. Most girls are of normal weight, and ‘normal’ is different for
each girl. But why should girls try to become clones of our
culture’s idea of beauty and happiness, especially if it is making us
very unhappy?

Thus, thin is not the new happy. Instead, I think our obsession
with thinness is the new unhappiness. Through the media’s
obsession of thinness, girls have become very unhappy and
uncertain of themselves. Their self-esteem has plummeted to new
time lows and they simply hate themselves.

For some girls, even passing past a mirror in a store can be so
excruciating.  How sad! This is especially the case because each girl
is beautiful in her unique own way.  Size and weight is merely a
number. What girls have to learn to do is to love themselves
unconditionally. Only then will they be happy and content in their
lives.

For more tips on how to cope with self-esteem and self-
confidence, please visit my blog at
www.adolescentgirlsblog.wordpress.com. I look forward to seeing
you there. Look for my E-books entitled Adolescent Self-Esteem and
Adolescent Self-Confidence to be posted to my blog within a month.