Author Description

"It's what's on the inside that counts," says everyone and anyone who's ever been concerned with a teenage girl's self-esteem. Apparently, those seven words--or nine if you're really picky about contractions--will fix a lot. They'll fix insecurities. They'll fix self-consciousness. They'll even fix the fact that none of us can open a magazine or turn on the TV without being bombarded by images of a million pretty girls. So thank every ounce of goodness for those seven words....Or not. Any teenage girl will tell you it's not that simple. One person can easily say, "Sheep are blue," but a billion drawings, movies, and farms will show you that they're white--and in a few very rare cases, black. Beauty is the same way. It will never matter how many times that one person tells us to look inside ourselves if the world around us doesn't. As a result, we develop this obsession with the way we look and what people think of the way we look. It can be something as simple and innocent as the clothes we wear, or it can be as dark and scary as an eating disorder. In the United States alone, there are ten million girls suffering from anorexia and/or bulimia. 95% of those girls are between the ages of 12 and 25, setting anorexia at the third most common illness among teenagers and resulting in a death rate 12 times higher than the norm. That's ten millions girls, 95% very young girls, who really don't know they're beautiful--who think beauty lies within the size label on their clothes or the flawlessness of their skin. I'm here to tell them--and you--that it doesn't. As a 17 year old, I know "it's what's on the inside that counts" doesn't lessen the perfection of Heidi Klum's legs or Taylor Swift's--everything. I know that the battle with popularity isn't over just because we say we don't care. I know what it feels like to be a teenage girl because I am one. I have similar insecurities, experiences, and friends. I make the same mistakes, love the same boy band cele