Don't Mess with my Body!

Have you ever looked in the mirror one day feeling happy about yourself and then suddenly you feel ashamed? Social media has a big impact on how you see things and can be like a new pair of eyes. We focused on how social media impacts your body image.  

Body image is how your body looks and if it's trendy or not. Body image is how you think about your body and your thoughts about your “shape” of body. 

We researched on how social media affected/impacted your body image over the isolation period. We chose to do this because more and more people spent more time on their phones because they had nothing else to do. Comparing yourself is not healthy for us but it's easy to do. Social media does not help this.  

We did a survey with teenage girls to see if people were being affected by social media. We found that a lot of people did spend too much time on their phones. 45% said yes and this can affect how they look at themselves because they can be looking at ‘Perfect bodies’ on their devices. 48% said that they did doubt their body image because of social media. 

A lot of people said that social media impacted their body  image very negatively and made them feel lazy, ashamed and not fit enough. We found out that 45% of people have compared themselves to people on social media. These comparisons could be of a range of things from people having the “perfect“ body to even the ideal face. Most of the time we want to change the way we look to please other people. 

Tik Tok and Instagram were the two apps that people felt had the biggest impact. Tik Tok at 32% and Instagram at 34%. We are not surprised that Instagram with 34% and Tik Tok 32% were the biggest forms of social media that impacts the way you look at your body image because they are the most popular apps that teenagers use. 

66% of people said that without social media they would still feel bad and doubt their body image. This is because you aren’t having to see it twenty-four seven. This was mainly because they wouldn't have to see 'perfect' bodies as much. 

Personal Opinion 

We personally think that social media can have a big impact on the way people look at their body image. This is because on social media people can use things like photoshop to make them have an  unrealistic body which other people then compare themselves to. Young people  like us are constantly scrolling through social media seeing all these perfect bodies or what you think is perfect. But then again you don't realise how much isn't real and most of it can just be photoshopped but for some reason we ignore this.  

We did not realize how much social media has an impact on our brains and affects how we look at things such as body image. 

By Emily Cumming and Katie Devine