‘No-BODY Is Perfect’ say YSI girls
FOLLOWING on from the success of last year’s Young Social Innovators ( YSI) project, ‘Stop Trafficking Of People’ at St Mary’s Secondary School, Mallow this year’s YSI class consisting of 30 students along with their teacher Ms Donna Lyons have chosen a new project topic to get stuck into.
The topic that the girls have chosen to raise awareness about is called ‘No-BODY is Perfect’. This project is firstly centred around raising awareness about eating disorders, highlighting the issue of pro-anorexic websites designed to encourage and provide tips to individuals on how to actively reduce calorie intake during their daily lives.
These websites are extremely dangerous to vulnerable individuals who suffer from eating disorders and the St Mary’s students feel that the websites need to be removed from the Internet.
Secondly, the students wish to raise awareness about the latest phenomenon to particularly effect our male population called ‘ bigorexia’, or medically referred to as ‘muscle dysmorphia’.
Muscle dysmorphia typically occurs in boys and men, who have a well-defined muscular build. People with this disorder believe and spend a great deal of time thinking that their muscular build is undersized and underdeveloped, and desire bigger muscles.
People who have muscle dysmorphia display a number of similar behaviours. Here is a list of typical behaviours of someone who is experiencing muscle dysmorphia, extreme exercise, especially resistance and weight training, many hours lifting weights, constant mirror-checking, avoiding social situations where they may appear muscularly small; compare their muscular build to others, extreme attention to diet, lifting while being injured, anxiety when missing a workout, neglecting family, friends, and job in order to exercise and use of anabolic steroids to enhance muscle mass.
Statistics show that the men and women suffering from the issues outlined above are on the rise at a terrifying rate, with individuals even as young as eight years old being affected. The St Mary’s students believe that given their platform as Young Social Innovators they have been given an opportunity to raise awareness about these serious societal problems and make a change.
They invite you to join in their movement. You can show your support for the students campaign by following them on Twitter @No-BODY Is Perfect or visit their Facebook page No-body Is Perfect.
The students thank the community of Mallow and surrounding areas in advance for their support. Key words of inspiration from the St Mary’s students are:
‘If we change the way we look at things, the things we look at will change. Ask yourself, “If not us, who? If not now, when?’