Scrolling through for hours and hours noticing the visible bones and perfect legs of each girls’ Instagram post that appears, Katie gets up to look in the mirror to notice that she looks just as she has for the past couple years. Ugly and fat, this is why you don’t have a boyfriend, she thinks as she has the body of a DI softball commit. As she begins to pinch her muscle wondering how she would look if it weren’t there, her mother calls for her, “Katie, dinner is done.”  
As she walks down the stairs, she realizes she cannot eat. She will never be as skinny as those other girls if she eats, so she tells her mom, “I’m not hungry I just ate a little while ago,” as she grabs a glass of water and goes back up to her room. Later, when trying to fall asleep, her stomach is rumbling; however, she sees it as a success, as part of the process to becoming skinny. 
Katie is woken up by the sound of her six am alarm, signaling it is time for her to go lift. She feels fine, the hunger has seemed to disappear only further showing Katie that she can handle what she is putting herself through, and she can be like the twig girls she sees on Instagram. Per usual, Katie walks out of lift and goes to get water for her protein shake; however, she quickly dumps the protein powder into the garbage before filling up the bottle. Katie feels a little light-headed, but it’s a feeling she uses as motivation, not one she caves in for. 
Lunch rolls around and everyone’s getting their tray. Katie sits down at the table and waits for her friends, “Aren’t you going to eat?” asks her friend Caroline.  
“No, I’m not really hungry I just had a protein shake after lifting,” Katie replies without skipping a beat. While walking back to class her stomach rumbles and a smile creeps onto her face, It has to be working, I must be getting skinnier. 
Practice comes next, Katie swings the bat over and over and feels exhausted after what is her usual warm-up. She makes it through practice with a headache and stomach cramps,  
“Katie you okay?” coach asks as she bends over just trying to keep her feet under her. “Yeah, just ya know…girl problems” she replies laughing it off. 
Walking into her house she heads straight to the shower, as the steam creeps over her body she gets dizzier and dizzier and eventually needs to sit down. She turns the water to cold and as she gets out, she looks in the mirror. Her stomach has shrunk a little, Not enough but it’s progress. 
Katie’s mom calls her to dinner and once again Katie makes up an excuse, “I just got food with some friends, I’m full.” As Katie lays down, she is overcome with exhaustion and decides to just fall asleep rather than do homework. Her stomach growls, Just go to bed food will not make you better it will just make you fatter. 
This is the all too true story of teenage girls in society. Body dysmorphia is very common in our age of social media, photoshop, and unachievable standards. As a whole society teaches girls, they must be skinny to be beautiful which is far from the truth. This story was just a single day in the life of a teenage girl not liking the reflection that stares back at her. Imagine living a life where days similar this happen regularly and fighting the never-ending battle of changing how one must look to be “beautiful.” Society should not find themselves praising photoshopped images of girls who have not eaten in weeks for it is outright unhealthy. Until society as a whole decides to change how we see beauty and stop the use of photoshop, girls, just like fictional Katie, will continue to live in the desperate cycle for approval.