She used to think.

     
      She was an average little girl. She played with her barbies, her collection of the "perfect" pretty skinny little blond dolls growing over the years. She ate her daily portion of fruits and vegetables, just like mommy told her to. She went outside and played with her neighbor, whom she was also supposed to marry when she got older. And, she watched TV. She loved watching tv... as a very young girl when she wasn't watching Disney movies, she was watching the Winnie the Pooh tv show, or Barney. Then she hit 6 years old, and she started watching some other things.. like Much Music, that had guests like Britney Spears and other famous celebrities of the time. She became fascinated by the story and the fame of these celebrities, and she started noticing them on the covers of magazines on the shelves in grocery stores. She noticed they all had something in common: they were beautiful, and they were skinny. Now as a young girl she was slim and the smallest in the class. But suddenly she became afraid of putting on a few pounds and not being beautiful like all the women she saw on the covers on magazines and in the tv shows. She used to think that being skinny was being beautiful. And the older she got the more obsessed she became with wanting to be "beautiful".

        There was always a little voice in the back of her mind telling her that she's not beautiful. That she's not skinny enough. But she was always strong enough, or maybe just too scared to really do anything about it, until she hit the teen years. She used to think that being skinny was being beautiful. And now, she would do whatever it took to be pretty, skinny, beautiful.
Do you really need to eat that?
Don't accept the ride home, you can walk, who cares if it's all uphill, you want to lose weight.
You ate too much today. Get rid of it.
You can go to bed hungry, it's okay.
Skinny.
Pretty.
Beautiful.
You want a "bikini body"
You want clothes to look good on you.
You want boys to think you're,
pretty.
skinny.
beautiful.
She used to think so low of herself. She used to think skinny. It took her a long time to pull herself up to a better place. She still fights it from time to time. But skinny is just a word. And she doesn't want to be just... pretty.

      She used to think being skinny was beautiful. The words floated around her head like something you'd see in a cartoon... skinny... pretty... beautiful... skinny... pretty... beautiful...
But now she thinks there's more to her than just her looks. She won't let the media tell her what beautiful is. She will make her own definition.