Summer is coming and that means it's almost time for ice cream, watermelon slices, pool parties, margaritas, and, unfortunately, bikini body season. Training is starting now with juice cleanses, intense workout regimes, and a whole new crop of thinspiration and #bodygoals to keep you motivated.
The body goals hashtag been blowing up on social media sites such as Tumblr, Twitter, Youtube and Instagram, and it's more destructive than helpful. Scrolling through Tumblr feeds, you see pictures of Instagram models with perfectly hairless skin, toned abs, and tanned bodies like Alexis Ren.
But no matter how much shaving cream we use or how many crunches we do our bodies most likely arent going to look like these girls in a few days or weeks. It took me longer than I'm willing to admit to understand that.
The target audience of a lot of social media sites, including Tumblr, is 13 to 18 year olds. These teens are constantly toying with their identities and tinkering their ideas of who they should be or look like. If they are constantly bombarded with pictures of girls looking perfect, like I was, with the hashtag BodyGoals, they are bound to start comparing their bodies to the ultra thin models and inevitably wonder why they don't look as sexy.
As summer creeps closer and closer more weight loss articles on Women's Health, Cosmo, and other women's magazines pop up and more girls get trapped in the mindset that they need to improve their bodies to be liked, fit in, or be beautiful, but summer should be about relaxing and enjoying the beautiful warm weather. It's time to take back summer.
This all becomes a perpetual cycle of self hatred and insecurity. A vast majority of these models have genetically better bodies than the average person is ever going to achieve. Like I have a large crooked Barbara Streisand nose, swimmer arms, thick course hair, and no boobs. I can look thousands of pictures of body inspiration and be envious, I can get plastic surgery, or I can just live and let die and accept that I'm always going to be a little odd looking.
And that's OK.
