While obesity and all other diseases triggered by being overweight are big health issues that many Americans are coping with and trying to prevent, we have also become a self-consumed culture obsessed with youth, dieting, counting calories and getting nipped and tucked. But life isn’t a TV show, and no one is watching. So, as we spread awareness for National Eating Disorder Awareness Week, we should also celebrate our bodies and voice our opinions about the kinds of images and messages that our media feeds us. Although the fashion industry and clothing designers have been working on diversifying their ads, fashion spreads and runway shows with models of different races, there still aren’t enough models out there that represent the average person. Dove is the only company that I have seen recently whose commercials are using plus-sized, healthy-figured women and men to promote their products. However, there are still fashion and cultural trends out there that promote negative lifestyles as attractive and appealing beauty standards that people try to live up to and eventually become. For instance, Kate Moss, a fashion icon and one of the most successful supermodels broke into the fashion industry because of her petite frame and waif-skinny figure. But it was not until the fashion industry coined her as the official trendsetter of “heroin-chic” that her reputation as a model changed. Heroin-chic is the fashion of wearing loose clothing that hangs over your emaciated body because you’ve been partying all week instead of eating or sleeping; heroin-chic was really popular in the early ’90s, but it’s starting to reemerge nowadays. Because of this, there have been recent public outcries against this fashion trend because it influences young people to believe that drug-use and, moreover, extreme thinness are attractive and appealing. Looking like death isn’t attractive, and doing drugs definitely is not, so what can inspire such a trend to become so widespread and appealing is baffling. Maybe it’s the appeal of being bad and different that make these trends attractive, but the meaning of being unique these days is not conforming to the “complicated,” unhealthy, gaunt-looking trend.

I believe that we, as a society and culture, need to make those changes and voice our opinions about what the media and the fashion industry feed us. We should change the way people think they should look, what they wear and who they aspire to become, not the fashion industry and the media. Because we inspire the creative minds of fashion designers, movie producers, TV writers and journalists, we should make those decisions; not them. We have that kind of power over them, and we should act on it. Who’s to say that our own realities can’t be beautiful, too? After all, the whole point of the ads in magazines and runway shows is to make us want to buy the dress, the pants, the shirt, the tie, the skirt and that blouse. The only way our society of women and men will allow us to fully accept ourselves for who we are is to change how we think we should look and not how we do look. So this week, do yourself a favor and take the advice that you’ve always been given-accept compliments, enjoy your favorite meal and be happy that you’re not like everyone else.

Tiffany Ayuda is a senior print journalism student. You may e-mail her at [email protected].