Amanda B

The Illnesses That Threaten Our Future

There is a big illness growing in our society that is making our future less bright, because is affecting our children. This illness is propagated by the constants lie of the media and the pressure of the society telling the people if you are not skinny you are nothing. The illnesses that threaten our boys and girls are the eating disorder and body image problems. Those problems in Puerto Rico are growing every year, because we are use to see models as role models that dont have any similarity with the Latin body. This makes the adolescents take the wrong path to the skinny perfect body and turn themselves to this destroying behavior.

The problems of eating disorder in Puerto Rica have become a treating issue, because especially a lot of young girls are becoming anorexic or bulimic, but we cant exclude the boys. The Puerto Rican girls are influence by the American culture in where if you dont look like Britney Spears, Angelina Jolie or any Victoria Secret model you are fat, and horrendous. This is a very bad misconception, because the body of a Puerto Rican girl will never look like a skinny model, because we have curves, and we arent recognize for been tall we are of a petite frame with curves. This is making the girls that are susceptible to all these media pressure starve themselves. And in the same wrong path are the girls that throw up all what they ate, but the saddest of this is that this happen and the people around this girls think they are in a diet or dont even notice the sings of the problem and dont look for medical help.In Puerto Rico the body image situation make a very deep mark in the adolescents, because are the most susceptible and in contact with this culture of skinniest that is propelled in all the T.V. shows and magazines they see. With this in mind what is the normal body for all this Puerto Rican adolescents is a svelte frame that can fit a size zero. For the Puerto Rican girls is very hard to achieve a size four imagine trying to fit in a size cero, and this dont means that the girl is fat no this mean that the body proportions of almost every Puerto Rican girl are curvy and voluptuous and is hard to find clothes that fit. In this misconceptions the parents play an important part, because some of them teach their child that be slender is been beautiful and blame them if they eat too much, and other parents put their daughters in modeling and make them follow a strict diet to can model. On the other hand are the boys that they fell less if they dont have the abdominals mark like the models of Calvin Klein, and they start to lift weight, run, and do push ups to have muscular bodies.

Those two big illnesses that affect almost every person without discrimination of age, but in particular affect the adolescents. The society need to make a statement to help all the persons that are passing threw those problems, because they can even lose their lives. With this in mind we need to teach the children since they are little that beauty is inside you and one of the things that complement that beauty is feeling comfortable in your own skin no matter what the other says or think, because thats your body not them, and if one time you feel something is wrong try to find help, because keeping it like a secret could make irreparable damage to your body, and you will need to live with it your entire live. After all we need to remember than being healthy will make you happy.