By Khalida Sarwari
It’s been said that the body is a temple and should be treated as such. And yet, nearly 10 million people in the U.S. suffer from eating disorders and body dissatisfaction, according to the Eating Disorders Resource Center, a Campbell-based nonprofit group.
Earlier this year, the organization held its third Every Body’s Beautiful essay contest. The purpose of the contest, said EDRC director Janice Bremis, is to help teens realize they don’t have to conform to the media’s standards of beauty to be healthy.
“We know that one of the predisposed factors to start an eating disorder is being obsessed with their body,” Bremis said. “Our goal is to help kids realize that everybody has a natural shape and weight, that everybody’s different.”
Students were asked to answer the following questions: What do you love about yourself? Why should others love and accept themselves? How does the mass media affect your body image, and how do you deal with this?
Shannon O’Hara, a 14-year-old from Saratoga, came in third in the middle school category for her essay, which focused mostly on the third question. In the essay, she shares an experience of going dress shopping at the mall with her friends and noticing “posters with gorgeous models in every window, advertisements for skin tight clothing that makes any teenager who’s not less than 115 pounds look like a hippo, and magazine stands selling pages and pages of photos of skinny women.”
When her mother, a disc jockey at a radio station, brought home the flier for the contest, Shannon, then an eighth-grader at Rolling Hills Middle School, jumped at the opportunity.
“I thought it was something I could write about easily,” she said. “Every girl can kind of relate to being a little pressured by ads and feeling overweight.”
Her essay won Shannon a $100 cash prize. It could very possibly have been Shannon’s maturity that swayed the judges. In her essay, she writes, “I weigh about 130 pounds, but I don’t feel overweight. I know I will never be toothpick thin, it’s written into my genetics, so all I can do is not let it get to me.”
