By Vanessa Garcia (Originally published Sept. 5, 2014 in the Washington Post)

I was lying in bed in my New York City apartment when the world went black. My breathing had gotten sluggish, and my heart felt like it was slowing down. I didn’t feel pressure in my chest, and I didn’t feel pain, just an overwhelming sense of tiredness and fatigue. A complete depletion of energy and the absolute inability to move. And then: black.

I hadn’t eaten anything but gum and coffee for three days. Even before that, I’d been eating very little for weeks, months, even years. I was 24 years old and a full-fledged anorexic-bulimic.

It was 2003, and I was trying to launch my career as a writer. I had dreamed of publishing my first novel by then. Instead, between the ages of 15 and 29, I suffered from numerous bouts of anorexia and bulimia. I wasted my most promising years and what little energy I had obsessing over my weight.

My problem reached the extreme, but these kinds of unhealthy relationships with food are hardly uncommon for women. At every turn we see them: a woman counting calories, a woman dieting despite her normal weight, a woman cutting carbs or pretending she’s allergic to gluten so she doesn’t have to eat that slice of pizza at the office party. I have friends who spend three hours at the gym and run marathons on a diet of bananas. This isn’t an exaggeration. According to the National Association of Anorexia Nervosa and Associated Disorders, 25 percent of college-aged women binge and purge as a form of weight-control.

College-educated women are leaning closer to the toilet bowl than to Sheryl Sandberg’s boardroom table. In the past several years, women have been speaking louder about gender discrepancies in the workplace, unfair pay and the paradoxes that arise out of trying to “have it all.” On the surface, 21st-century feminism seems to be booming. But even as writer Hanna Rosin proclaimed “The End of Men” in 2010, women were really the ones disappearing. Quite literally. According to a 2009 article in the American Journal of Psychiatry, eating disorders have the highest mortality rate of any mental disorder.

Women are starving themselves. They’re spending more time thinking about their calorie intake than how to change the world. It’s not just the severe disorders that we have to be wary of. In a 2008 survey by SELF magazine and the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, 75 percent of women reported disordered eating patterns, 37 percent regularly skipped meals to lose weight, and 26 percent cut out entire food groups. The report concluded that “eating habits that women think are normal — such as banishing carbohydrates, skipping meals and in some cases extreme dieting — may actually be symptoms of disordered eating.”

The drivers of this illness are all around us. Models weigh as much as 30 percent less than their recommended weight and plus-size models are often as small as a size 6. The press tells us that Victoria Beckham lost her “baby weight” with the Five Hands Diet, which means she ate five fistfuls of food a day. And there are actresses such as Elizabeth Hurley, who notoriously told Allure magazine that she’s always “thought Marilyn Monroe looked fabulous, but I’d kill myself if I was that fat.” Monroe was about 5 feet 5 inches tall and fluctuated between 118 and 140 pounds.

Even now, when songs like “All About That Bass” by Meghan Trainor hit the pop charts, I have to wonder if they are the solution or the problem. The song, touted as a healthy-sized woman’s anthem, is actually pretty demeaning considering that the only reason Trainor gives for being happy with her curves is that guys like them: “Yeah, my mama she told me don’t worry about your size/She says boys like a little more booty to hold at night.” 

Women have to take their bodies back. We can’t close gender gaps when we spend endless hours counting calories instead of cracking glass ceilings. We can’t gain self-assurance when body dysmorphia is so abundant. It takes a whole lot of strength, fuel and energy to push all of inequity’s baggage off of us.

I know exactly the kind of life that weight obsession leads to. I was shaken out of my blackout by an enormous push on my back, a big jolt and something — perhaps my inner voice – whispering, “You have too much left to do.” I realized that I was alone and that I could very likely die that way. I could waste away, along with my brain, my thoughts and everything I could possibly become. I put on my coat, went outside and bought a wrap. I tried to ingest it. It was painful, both physically and emotionally, but I wanted to live. This was the beginning of my recovery. Back then, I was 5 feet 5 inches tall and 100 pounds with a winter coat, sweaters, long underwear and boots on. (I only weighed myself fully dressed in winter, so if I weighed too much, I could blame it on the extra clothes.) It took five years from that moment — two of those in weekly therapy — for me to truly gain normalcy in my eating patterns. 

All I can think now is: What a waste of life. I think about the missed opportunities and the unmet goals I sacrificed because of the time and energy I wasted on cutting my weight. If I could talk to my 25-year-old self, I’d tell her,

“Your time is precious. Get help. Do it now. You have too many important things to do.”

Vanessa Garcia is a writer, playwright, and journalist. She is a doctoral candidate at the University of California Irvine. 

Amen, Vanessa. When girls and women are constantly fixated on calories, carbs, weight, shape and appearance, they are stunted in every other thought process or pursuit. Our health, happiness, relationships, education and contributions to the world are damaged and stifled when we are dedicating a steady, invisible stream of mental and physical energy to monitoring and controlling our appearances. It doesn’t have to be this way. We can take our power back by recognizing the forces that push us to fixate on our bodies and recognizing the amount of time and energy we often unwittingly devote to these distractions. Once we recognize how unnatural and stifling it is to prioritize the look of our bodies above all else, we can reject those messages, beliefs, and actions that keep us in those chains. We can fulfill the potential each of us have to contribute good to a world that needs our unique awesomeness.

You can use your pain — your dark, unhappy, hurtful thoughts and experiences relating to your body — as a platform to grow stronger. You can see more about yourself and the world, and be more than you could be without that pain. Not in spite of those hard experiences, but because of those hard experiences. This process is called Body Image Resilience, and it is within anyone’s reach who is willing to face body image problems head-on rather than coping with them through harmful means like disordered eating, cutting, abusing alcohol, or any other means of attempting to hide or fix our bodies.

Need more help developing body image resilience that can help you overcome your self-consciousness and be more powerful than ever before? Learn how to recognize harmful ideals, redefine beauty and health, and resist what holds you back from happiness, health, and real empowerment with the Beauty Redefined Body Image Program for girls and women 14+. It is an online, anonymous therapeutic tool that can change your life, designed by Lexie & Lindsay Kite, with PhDs in body image and media.

In the U.S., 20 million women and 10 million men suffer from a life-threatening eating disorder during their lives. Many of those millions will never seek help and will die from the disorder. The No. 1 contributor to the development of anorexia and bulimia is poor body image, and that is one of the many reasons we fight for girls and women to understand we are more than just bodies to be looked at, fixed, and judged.

About the Author: Our very own Facebook administrator, Keighty Brigman, LMSW, recovered from an eating disorder and then moved to helping other women recover from their own EDs. Here, she shares her expertise on how to decide if you have an unhealthy relationship with food and/or a distorted idea of where your worth comes from. If you recognize your own thoughts and behaviors in this post, we’re here to help you break free.

My heart was racing in my chest. The sweat was pooling on my palms, and though I could hear my mother talking, I couldn’t make out the words she was saying. Instinct, self-preservation, something had me nodding and responding enough to let her think I was paying attention, when the only thing that had my focus was the internal battle occurring in my brain.

Do it.

Don’t do it!

Just do it. It isn’t a big deal.

You don’t deserve it.

Think of how good it will be.

Fine. Just do it. You aren’t good enough to say no anyway.

With the pressure I felt to make the right decision, fighting between my will and my primal instinct, both at complete odds with one another, one would assume I was conflicted over a major life decision. But the back and forth wasn’t over school, a profession, a relationship.

It was over a peach.

Though it was many years ago, I can still remember the simultaneous sensation of pure ecstasy and utter anguish as I bit into the sweet flesh, and while it was the only thing that I had eaten that day, the many justifications of how much exercise I’d done already, how much I would do still before going to bed, quickly melted under the self loathing at my sense of defeat.

I’m not stronger than a peach, I thought.

I’m pathetic, I thought.

No wonder no one loves me, I thought.

Recovery followed a time after that, and since then, I have had the immense honor of working with dozens of women experiencing the mental prison known as an eating disorder. “Eating disorder” is such a broad, generic term that entails both a wide variety of symptoms (those for Anorexia Nervosa, Bulimia Nervosa, Binge Eating Disorder, and Other Specified Feeding and Eating Disorder), and also is experienced by a wide variety of women: professionals, adolescents, those with dark and troubled upbringings, those with picture perfect families, mothers, grandmothers, sisters, daughters, athletes, introverts, and partiers. They were women teaching Sunday school, and women who always had their nose in a book. They were women winning medals in gymnastics, and women trying to figure out how to afford to go back to school.

And just as the experiences of the women varied person to person, the way they looked also varied. Advertisements and movies would have us believe that an eating disorder looks like a thin layer of flesh on jutting hip bones, and while I certainly saw plenty of those, I also saw women who were short, those who were tall, those with shaved heads and those with hair that went on for days. I saw women who looked like they could take a punch, and women who you wouldn’t give a second thought about if you saw them at your kid’s bake sale. There were women who, seeing them on the street, would not cause you to stare in wonder at how they were still breathing.

In short, they looked like everyone else.

The difference, though, was the intense fear they felt — saturating every moment — of gaining weight. It was the intense relationship between what the number said on the scale and how they felt about themselves that day. It was the periods of eating more food in one sitting than what is normal, and then getting rid of it—through purging, excessive exercise, or restricting food intake over the next few days. It was the constant mental tape playing, calculating how many calories have been consumed versus how many have been burned.

On the outside, they may look like anyone else. But emotionally, they are clawing for survival.

Surviving in the throes of an eating disorder is to live in a place where there is no happiness. There isn’t room for anything positive, because the eating disorder convinces you that such goodness is far outside of the bounds of what you deserve. If you feel like you may be experiencing an eating disorder, please know you are not alone, and while it seems impossible that it can ever get better, it can. You can get to the other side of this, and you deserve to feel better.

For those of you who may be teetering on the edge, or heading on the path toward the awful pit eating disorders create, here are some things to ask yourself:

• Do I eat less (significantly less) than the people around me?
• Do I avoid social gatherings that I know will involve food?
• Do I make excuses to avoid eating, even though I have not eaten in a while?
• Do I fixate on the calories various foods contain?
• Do I have a list of “bad” foods? “Good” foods?
• Do I eat to avoid feeling negative emotions?
• Do I feel guilt after eating?
• Do I weigh myself daily/multiple times a day, and do I have an emotional reaction each time I read that number?
• Do I tell myself, “I’ll be happy/successful/loveable/worthy when I’m at ____ lbs”?
• Do I make plans to “make up” for foods that have been eaten, either through purging, excessive exercise, or skipping meals?
• Do I feel out of control when it comes to food?
• Do I seek control through the foods I eat?
• Do I find myself thinking about what I have eaten, what I will eat, how much exercise I’ve done, what exercise I will do, etc. at times when I am trying to focus on something else?

If you answered “yes” to any of these, it suggests you have an unhealthy relationship with food and/or an unhealthy idea of where your worth comes from. Culturally speaking, the pressure on women (and yes, men too) to look a certain way can make it easy to internalize negative ideas that can result in these unhealthy thought patterns, and those thoughts can escalate to an eating disorder. It can become easy to write off any of these as something one simply does to be thin, to diet, to be attractive. But there is no room for beauty and no opportunity to feel beautiful under the heavy veil of constant self-criticism, and any space given to entertain thoughts degrading your self-worth is too much.

You deserve better. You can get better.

For more information on eating disorders, you can visit www.nationaleatingdisorders.org, which includes an online self-assessment and tools to find professionals in your area who can help. There is freedom in health, both in mind and body. May you have the courage to demand it.

Selfies aren’t inherently evil. And taking 55 pictures of your own face at slightly different angles and with varying expressions is not fundamentally wrong. BUT (you knew that was coming) … when we put this female-driven phenomenon in the context of the culture in which we live, selfies aren’t just a trivial trend or a form of self-expression. 

Photo by Michelle Phan

Rather, they are a clear reflection of exactly what girls and women have been taught to be their entire lives: images to be looked at. Carefully posed, styled, and edited images of otherwise dynamic human beings for others to gaze upon and comment on. Selfies are not just images you take of yourself for yourself; they are images you take of yourself for others to see. Selfies weren’t a thing until social media made it possible to receive validation in an easy, public way online. And what have girls and women been taught from Day 1 brings them the most value? Looking good. Not being smart or funny or kind or talented — mostly just looking hot. Thus, the validation females have been taught to seek is the approval of others regarding their appearances.  Today, we’re coining a new term:

Selfie-objectification. Noun: to present oneself as an object, especially of sight or other physical sense, through a photograph that one takes of oneself, for posting online, which process manifests itself in three steps (see below).

Snapping photos of ourselves to document what we look like in certain moments, looks, or angles is a new form of self-objectification that we call “selfie-objectification.” There are three stages of selfie-objectification: 1) capturing photos of oneself to admire and scrutinize 2) ranking and editing those photos to generate an acceptable final image, and 3) sharing those photos online for others to validate. In our doctoral studies (Kite, 2013 & Kite, 2013), almost 3/4 of women described themselves in self-objectifying terms, meaning they viewed themselves from an outsider’s perspective. Self-objectification diminishes our capabilities, happiness, and self-worth because we have to live and do and be and also constantly monitor and imagine what we look like while living and doing and being. If you’re an avid selfie-taker, we ask you to consider the effects of these 3 stages of selfie-objectification in your life.  

 Stage 1: Capturing and Scrutinizing

“Social platforms … which are solely image based, force patients to hold a microscope up to their own image and often look at it with a more self-critical eye than ever before,” says Edward Farrior, MD, President of the AAFPRS. “These images are often the first impressions young people put out there to prospective friends, romantic interests and employers and our patients want to put their best face forward.”

Stage 2: Ranking, Editing, and Selecting a Winner

After our selfie-ographer has examined and evaluated her photos, she selects the perfect shot for public viewing. If she’s like at least 50% of social  media users**, she’ll Photoshop or edit her image before posting. About half of people who edit their own photos will do this in order to “enhance their looks” by removing blemishes, changing skin tones or color, or making themselves look thinner (or in recent Kardashian-related incidents — curvier). We NEVER get to see female reality in mainstream media, and those unreal ideals result in the pressure we feel to alter our images to look more like the normalized cartoonish “perfection” we see everywhere else, and creates a whole new world of un-reality in social media. JUST in case this needs to be stated outright: Please don’t compare yourself to anyone else’s photos. You don’t know the effort that has gone into that shot behind the scenes or in post-production. Self-comparisons in social media contribute to depression and anxiety among girls and women, and when we’re aware that we’re comparing our unfiltered lives to shots of others’ glamorized lives, we can consciously cool it. Please cool it. For your health.

Stage 3: Sharing and Monitoring

After posting the winning shot, she’s likely to carefully monitor the “likes” and comments each photo receives and compare those tiny symbols of validation to others’ photos. The more likes and the nicer the comments, the better she feels about herself, or rather, the part of herself she’s been trained to prioritize: her appearance. But what happens when the number of likes isn’t to her liking? Or the comments are critical, or there are no comments? What happens to her self-worth then? When that self-worth is largely based on others’ perceptions of her appearance, and others don’t seem to be appreciating her appearance, her entire self-worth suffers.  This brings us to the biggest issue we have with people touting selfies as tools for empowerment. They’re not. You’re confusing “empowerment” with “feeling beautiful” or “feeling like other people think I look good.” Empowerment has to be so much more dynamic and all-encompassing than that. “Power” can not be minimized to something that is gained and wielded through appearance or beauty. “Power” from beauty is cheap. It is fleeting and can be consumed and discarded at any moment. Your power isn’t just in your beauty; it’s in who you are and what you do. Dove’s latest marketing video, aptly named “Selfie,” asks girls and women to “redefine beauty” by taking selfies and realizing how beautiful they are. One of the take-away messages at the end of the video is a girl saying, “I was looking through my selfies last night and I realized I am beautiful. I’m pretty cute.” Looking through your selfies to remind yourself of your value is the perfect illustration we’d use to describe selfie-objectification. We’ve written a whole post on the subject here. Of course we want people to feel good about themselves, and even to feel beautiful, but what we really want people to know is: regardless of what you look like, or what you think you look like, you can feel good about yourself because you are not your appearance. Positive body image is the cornerstone of our work, and it is founded in the life-changing understanding that your body is an instrument to be used and not just an object to be adorned and looked at. In a world that teaches us we are our bodies, and that our carefully selected images of ourselves are a great tool for validation and empowerment, we want to YELL that THIS IS NOT TRUE! Taking the perfect selfie, loving your selfies, admiring your selfies are NOT strategies for empowerment, but merely strategies for short-lived, surface-oriented endorsements from others from which we’ve been primed to base our selfie-worth. (Had enough of that word yet? We have.)

Here’s what we want you to take away from this post:

Self-objectification is a serious threat to our capacities to achieve all we can achieve. And selfies, as a product of our appearance-obsesssed culture, can be viewed as one more tool we use to self-objectify without even realizing it because of how normal and prevalent the phenomenon has become. If we’re serious about empowerment and positive body image (which we at Beauty Redefined very much are), then we have to critically consider the ways we view and represent ourselves and the ways we seek validation and empowerment. If you are using selfies as a means for looking at yourself from an outsider’s perspective, scrutinizing and evaluating your appearance, and seeking approval from others in order to improve your self-worth, then we recommend reconsidering the role of selfies in your own life. One of the best ways find out how much you depend on social media for validation is to go on a media fast. Take just a few days and cut out all media. It’ll rock your world — in a good way. Please understand: For many people, the occasional selfie is not a desperate cry for approval or even a misdirected means for empowerment. By all means, show your social media friends that new haircut, or your awesome fuchsia lipstick. It’s OK to desire validation for how you present yourself to the world. We are not going to pretend like our bodies are invisible or that anything beauty-related should be shunned. Absolutely not. However, we live in a world that prizes beauty for females above all else, and all beauty-related choices must be critically viewed through that lens. If you recognize that you’re basing much of your self-worth or personal feelings of empowerment on what others think of your appearance, or even spending too much precious time, money or energy on beauty-related matters (including selfies), then you’ve got a great opportunity to make changes that yield actual empowerment. We hope you’ll join us in the fight against self-objectification by taking a critical look at the role of selfies in our lives. Women are more than just bodies. See more. Be more. THAT is Beauty Redefined.   Need more help developing body image resilience that can help you overcome your self-consciousness and be more powerful than ever before? Learn how to recognize harmful ideals, redefine beauty and health, and resist what holds you back from happiness, health, and real empowerment with the Beauty Redefined Body Image Program for girls and women 14+. It is an online, anonymous therapeutic tool that can change your life, designed by Lexie & Lindsay Kite, with PhDs in body image and media.

Ever heard the phrase “Mind the gap?” It’s a warning to train passengers to take caution while crossing the gap between the train door and the station platform that began in London. Today, it’s time to use that phrase as a warning of a different kind of life-or-death danger – the obsession with “thigh gaps” taking place on social media and beyond. Facebook, Tumblr, Instagram, and Twitter are flooded with thigh gaps, which are basically pictures of thin legs from the front or back with space in between them. The thigh gap qualifying “rule” is for the gap to be visible when the person’s feet are together. Millions are following this trend online and resorting to unhealthy extremes to get a gap of their own – a trendy status symbol of beauty. We believe this trend is SO pervasive because it is so largely unattainable. It pops up where you’d least expect it – on conservative blogs or Instagram feeds of young moms wearing skinny jeans “just showing off their cute new sandals!” And it pops up where you’d always expect it – the Twitter feeds of supermodels with profiles dedicated to their thigh gaps (and no, we will not link to them and give them unnecessary attention). We are asking you to MIND THE (THIGH) GAP.  The next time you see thin thighs and the space between them being celebrated online — whether blatantly or subtly — mind the gap!  Use it as a warning that what you’re seeing is the latest symbol of oppression and objectification for girls and women – not a symbol of feminine success, health and beauty. Sounds a bit extreme? We don’t think so. Here are four reasons it’s time to mind the gap:

Significant thigh gaps in real life are brought to us by certain genetics, ethnicities, pelvic sizes and widths, and most girls and women do not have a natural gap, according to a director at the Children’s National Medical Center in D.C. If you or someone you know has a thigh gap, cool! That’s great. We’re not calling anyone out for resorting to unhealthy extremes to get one; we are simply pointing out the reality that thigh gaps are not NEARLY as common in real life as media would have us believe. These days, websites are dedicated to explaining how to get a gap between your legs when your feet are together and too many of them emphasize that you must avoid exercises like calf raises, squats, lunges, stairs, or anything else that might build muscle. Really?! No.

Victoria’s Secret is famous for digitally enhancing a “thigh gap” on their models.

Thanks to the wonders of an easy tool on Photoshop, thigh gaps are made and widened with one click. If a media maker has any sort of photo editing software, she or he can make a thigh gap appear instantly. Victoria’s Secret is especially proficient at using it constantly! One of the easiest ways to detect this Photoshop trend is to check out the background behind the model. If the area behind her thigh gap is blurred or looks different than the area on the other sides of her legs, it’s a good way to spot a Photoshop hack job thigh gap.

The perfect way to objectify a woman is to literally or figuratively view her as a compilation of body parts to be looked at, judged, and fixed. If you see an image of a woman without her face visible or with her head cut off, she is being objectified. It happens to women in media EVERY SECOND. You can’t pass a billboard without seeing a headless woman selling plastic surgery or flip through a magazine without a set of breasts selling anything unrelated to breasts. Millions of thigh gap pictures are floating around online to serve as inspiration for girls and women fixated on the gap and willing to resort to any extreme to get there (plastic surgery, eating disorders, exercise obsession, etc.). SO many of these thigh gap pictures feature only part of a woman, which effectively renders her less than human. Most of them feature naked or nearly naked women. What a great way to keep a girl in her place as a sexual object to be looked at. Instead of moving on to progress and be happy in any way that matters – instead of looking outside ourselves for one moment – girls and women are learning to obsess about their parts and self-objectify to a degree never before seen. “Taught from infancy that beauty is woman’s scepter [power], the mind shapes itself to the body and roaming round its gilt cage, only seeks to adorn its prison” (Wollstonecraft, 1792).

New beauty ideals are being sold to us at every possible turn. Media makers and industry leaders are coming up with new “flaws” we need to feel ashamed of so we’ll shell out our hard earned money, compromise our health, and stay in the prisons of our own bodies instead of living, being, and doing. From our heads to our toes, we’ve got so much to worry about! Hair color, complexion, eyelash length, eyebrow shape, nose shape, lip fullness, skin color (too dark OR too pale), skin softness, skin firmness, armpit smoothness, body hair, breast size, amount of cellulite, body shape, weight, and our toenails. “Women’s work” is beauty labor, and it keeps us from the happiness and fulfillment of doing ANYTHING ELSE. Can you imagine the progress girls and women could make in every possible field if we could learn to rebel against industries that are established to prey on our insecurities? Scholars assert that beginning with puberty and continuing across the life course, girls are twice as likely to experience depression as boys and men. For girls but not boys, self-esteem plummets at puberty and is directly associated with body dissatisfaction, which negatively affects their performance in mental and physical activities, including mathematics, logical reasoning, spatial skills, athletic performance, and sexual assertiveness.* Next time you see a thigh gap being celebrated online, mind the gap as a symbol of oppression that is keeping girls and women inside the prison of adorning their bodies. You can work on taking back beauty that rightfully belongs to you by refusing to buy the lies these industries are selling. 

So if you have “thick thighs” or any meat on your thighs at all, it’s time to stop vilifying them! It’s time to stop hiding them by sitting in that precisely flattering way or only wearing baggy clothes or refusing to swim or hike or play in case someone sees them in all their regular-womanly-thigh glory. Can you imagine the inexpressible joy girls and women across the world would feel if we could just have ONE DAY to not worry about the way our thighs LOOK and instead focus on how awesome our thighs are, seeing as how they help us to LIVE and DO and BE and PLAY and WORK? What if we took the time to appreciate having the use of our thighs, regardless of what they look like, and consider what a gift they are? Many people don’t even get to enjoy fully functioning thighs. I don’t know about you, but I’m dedicated to doing my best to appreciate them and OWN that gift every day with the help of my thighs that absolutely, positively touch each other when my feet are together, and always will forever, thank you very much.

Friends, social media is where activism takes place. Do you realize your power in this world to DO and BE and SPEAK? You are where you are right now on purpose, and you’ve got some cool work to do that no one else can do.  You’ve got more power and influence than you know to make a difference in a world that needs you – not just a vision of you, not just you with a thigh gap – but ALL of you.  And you’ve got an opportunity to take media into your own hands – to use it for good, to share positive truths with your circles, to choose what you will and won’t watch/read and help others do the same. A good place to start is on our Facebook page. Just like Naomi Wolf says in her awesome book The Beauty Myth, “While we cannot directly affect the images [in media], we can drain them of their power. We can turn away from them and look directly at one another. We can lift ourselves and other women out of the myth.”

We take a bottom-up approach to the epidemic of body hatred and looks obsession plaguing girls and women today.  We are all about rethinking the ideas of “beautiful” and “healthy” that we’ve likely learned from for-profit media that thrives off female insecurity. Girls and women who feel OK about their bodies — meaning they aren’t “disgusted” with them like more than half of women today – take better care of themselves. We continuously promote the idea that all women are worthwhile AND beautiful while fighting against the harmful ideals we’re sold at every turn. So, whether you’ve got a thigh gap or not, it’s time to MIND THE GAP and then turn our time, attention and energy to much better things. Each time you see a thigh gap being unhealthily celebrated in media, choose to heed that warning symbol – a symbol of oppression that serves to keep us “in our place” as objects to be looked at. Next time you see a blatant celebration of the thigh gap, mind the gap in these easy ways:

• Take the opportunity to share our website or this post with whoever posted the photo or commented about striving for that ideal.
• If the photo you saw triggered a feeling of shame or inadequacy about your own body, go for a walk or play a sport or dance with your mom, sister, friends or mirror to remind yourself what a gift your body is.
• If you frequent a Tumblr, Facebook page, or Instagram account that features thinspiration like thigh gap images, whether intentionally focusing on thigh thinness or just subtly highlighting it in the name of “fashion,” turn away. Unsubscribe. Unfollow. Block them so you don’t go back.
• If you shop at stores that glorify the thigh gap and perpetuate it as a beauty ideal, speak up with your pocketbook and stop shopping there. Hit them where it counts!
• Now give a girl or woman in your life a hug and tell them why they are so amazing. I have a feeling it’s about way more than whether or not she has space between her thighs.

Need more help developing body image resilience that can help you overcome your self-consciousness and be more powerful than ever before? Learn how to recognize harmful ideals, redefine beauty and health, and resist what holds you back from happiness, health, and real empowerment with the Beauty Redefined Body Image Program for girls and women 14+. It is an online, anonymous therapeutic tool that can change your life, designed by Lexie & Lindsay Kite, with PhDs in body image and media. *Fredrickson et al. 1998; Fredrickson & Harrison, 2004; Gapinski, Brownell, & LaFrance, 2003; Harter, 1993; Hebl, King, & Lin, 2004; Nolen-Hoeksema, 1990; Simmons, Rosenberg, & Rosenberg, 1973; Steinberg, 1999; Steingraber, 2007 **Patricia van den Berg & Dianne Neumark-Sztainer. (2007). Journal of Adolescent Health.