Perfectly Unstable

They say the hardest eras in a girl’s life is when she begins to predispose her mind and body to receive the expectations society places on her. I say hardest because the majority of them can’t or won’t have the full capacity to stay true to her values and self-love. Everyday, they encounter a new page of their book, but each time the page becomes dirtier, harder to follow but still comes with more desire of being accomplished. The Columbus School being one of most strict and hard societies to fit in, creates a bubble in which women enter a stage of blindness and will do anything to follow the ideal stereotype just for feeling and sometimes for just being accepted in the clique.    

According to IDB News 17.7% of Medellin’s population suffer from eating disorders. The greatest enemy of someone is themselves, what I mean is that as the days in our perfect teenage life pass, society becomes responsible for making us obsess with the idea that everything in our bodies, mind, style among others, is wrong and we should always do something to “improve” it. The mind of each adolescent damages piece by piece but we also become responsible of calling it growth. Everyday girls from TCS and all around the world a front with unpleasant criticism of their life, leading them to take wrong decisions which lead them to a thin thread between life and misery. The measure of pressure applied on them to get this perfect shape is ludicrous, this ideal body generalization is disintegrating their psychological and physical steadiness. Weight on young ladies has turned out to be devastating as they now persevere hours of exercise and deny themselves to extraordinary eating regimens that they call a legitimate sustenance, achieving the point where a significant number of them think of it as a wrongdoing to eat an ice cream at Crepes.

“The majority of my friends go to the gym and have a diet to stay in shape, however they don’t think it as exercise to maintain a healthy life, they see it as an exercise to avoid themselves becoming physically unattractive,” said Tatiana Botero, TCS Junior. If you ask teenagers on a daily basis what will they be doing after school, you will be receiving a lot of similar answers; they will be attending the gym but for most part hating every step of the way. The majority of young women at TCS hate the gym, but will only go because if they don’t, anxiety will play a hard roll in their bodies, and their mind will play awful games, making them feel they are in debt with themselves. Many, loose the beauty of living the teenage life, they forget or deny anything that provides pleasure for them because they feel in a future it will affect them in some negative way. They enslave themselves to their mind and prohibit their body to have a cheat meal, or have a drink with their girls, because at the end, all of it becomes the same thought, that will make me fat.  

At our school, girls are constantly comparing and dreaming about having the body of a model and spending hours on their phones looking for weight loss strategies. They submit their body to a harsh routines where they even start counting calories or medicating themselves proteins and diets that will only affect their whole organism. “I have met clients who’ve come to me with a bunch of ideas and ‘diets’ that they create by themselves because they read it on a “reliable” page of google. Actually, many arrive with their organism completely destroyed but because they’re young, their body endures, that if, to a point,” expressed Marta Moreno, famous nutriologist in Medellín and TCS campuses. It becomes a vicious habit that becomes unstoppable and insatiable. As Moreno also states, many of her clients also refuse to leave the diet once the process and objective has been successfully achieved, and here is when all type of eating disorders rise. It’s ridiculous that teenagers develop health issues such as anorexia and bulimia due to the pressure society is exerting on them to obtain this ideal body. At The Columbus School, several cases have been reported. Students have lost weight in a short periods of time, gotten sick in the process, and ended up needing medical treatment. Although some people dismiss the issue, claiming girls just aren’t aware of healthy eating habits, the truth is girls act like this with a clear goal in mind. Eating disorders are born from insecurity and result from the need to achieve quick results.

At last, society must evolve, marks of disgrace and stereotypes should be reevaluated, and individuals shouldn’t be characterized in view of their appearance. This social issue requires a quick arrangement and the solution is tolerance. The prioritization of appearances must stop with a specific end goal to accomplish a more beneficial society. At The Columbus School the bubble must acknowledge the way that young women are not defined on appearances and comprehend that fitness ought to be a decision not an obligation. It’s everybody’s duty to fortify positive practices and cancel this issue devours society.