I believe in positive body image. Young girls should not grow up idealizing overly thin magazine models or feel pressure to diet and lose weight.

We should grow to love our bodies, eat well and exercise to achieve a healthy lifestyle rather than impossible societal standards.

We should learn to understand that people have different body types and gain or lose weight differently. I believe all these things, but sometimes, I think our media is taking it too far.

Last week, I saw an article on Buzzfeed talking about a beauty salon for plus-sized women.

It sounded like a cool idea, so I clicked on it. The pictures shown in the article were shocking. Almost all the women pictured were not plus-sized. They were morbidly obese. The article then continued to talk about how plus-sized women were still beautiful and deserved to be satisfied with the way they were. I closed the article, stunned.

Yes, plus-sized women are still humans. Yes, they can still be beautiful. But what I saw in that article was not beautiful.

It was obesity, heart disease, diabetes. It was a lifetime of illness and a major strain on our healthcare. I began to do more research. More and more overweight and obese models have been introduced into the industry, media has promoted unhealthy weights as "real beauty" to promote "body positivity." This is not real beauty.

Don't get me wrong, I fully support loving your body for the way it is, but loving it means improving it in a healthy way.

Promoting the idea that obesity is beautiful is the opposite of healthy body image — it says to consumers that obesity, the number one cause of illness in America, is okay, and that they shouldn't do anything to fix it. It's saying that healthy lifestyles aren't necessary to be beautiful, which simply isn't true. Neither the stick-thin magazine model nor the overweight one is healthy, and that is not beautiful. Beautiful is being happy and healthy, and that is what should be on our cover pages and magazine spreads.