23. Body Image and the Pressure to Be Perfect

Have you ever heard of the quote, “You are your own worst critic?” There so much truth to that statement! So many times, we tend to pick out all of the things we don’t like about ourselves: our hair, our skin, our nose, our weight, our personality…even our laugh.

I want you to take a little test. If you have a pen and paper, go ahead and grab that. If not, you can do this in your head.

The first thing I want you to do is, in the next 15 seconds, make a list of as many things as you can that you don’t like about yourself...and go!

How many things did you come up with? Go ahead and count them and put the number on your paper. Maybe you think your nose is too big…or too small. Maybe you wish you could be taller…or short. Maybe you wish that you weren’t so shy and quiet…or maybe too loud. It seems like there’s always something we want to change, right?

I think one of the biggest reasons that it’s so easy for us to list all of the things about our bodies we don’t like is because our appearance means a lot to us. In episode 22, we talked about cliques and how a lot of times we will either be accepted or rejected based on our we look and how we dress. We struggle with wanting to be ourselves, who God created us to be, while at the same time wanting to be accepted by others.

This is something that I see so often among teen girls. We all want to be noticed and feel accepted and many times we will begin to act differently and dress differently…maybe more immodestly…to get those around us to notice us. Honestly, what it all comes down to, though, sometimes we struggle with knowing how valuable we are to God.

All right, so now, I want you to make another list. In the next 15 seconds, list as many things as you can that you love about yourself that you would never want to change….and...go!

Was it as easy to come up with that second list as it was the first one? Not for most of us. Count how many things were on your second list and compare it to your first list.

Why is it that it’s so easy to come up with that first list, but maybe not so easy to come up with that second one? I honestly think it has a lot to do with our body image and the pressure to be perfect…so that’s exactly what we’re going to talk about today.

Let’s start off by answering the question, “What is body image?” Body image is how you see, think, feel and act toward any part of your body.

And social media doesn’t help us with gaining a positive body image! Actually, social media is the #1 influencer on body image in teen girls. I shared in one of our previous podcasts that the average time a teen spends on social media since the shutdown is 9 hours a day! Think about all the time that is being spent on comparing ourselves to others. Now, if this is you…don’t feel condemned.

I want to help you walk this journey and really begin to love who it is that God created you to be. So please don’t hear that I’m putting you down. I want to help you more than anything!

In addition, so much time on social media pressures us to feel like we need to be perfect or we won’t measure up. What we may know, but not always think about it that the majority of the photos are fake, they have been filtered, airbrushed or photoshopped. So, many times what we’re co

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