Disclaimer: These videos are part of the WISER tutorial anything else that comes up as a suggestion is not part of the WISER tutorial. Youtube will suggest related content based on viewing history. Enjoy the videos.

Welcome back! Within this tutorial, we are going to talk about body image, a very important part of our happiness and wellbeing as young people and throughout our whole life!

Body image is the term we use when we are talking about how we feel about our bodies, and how important we think the appearance of our bodies are.

Here is a little introduction from Grace, one of our WISER educators!

It would be wonderful if everyone was taught to love themselves and their bodies from an early age! However, we know that there are many things we encounter along the way that can make loving and accepting our looks difficult.

TV, films, music videos, magazines and social media can all play a role in making us feel badly about our bodies. They can trick us into thinking there are only a few ways in which people can be beautiful – for example they need to have straight white teeth, clear skin, be a certain weight and height and shape. This is nonsense!!! Lots of companies have made bags of money from making people feel that they are not beautiful enough, as they encourage us to buy products that will make us ‘more’ beautiful. It is no wonder that people can end up feeling that they don’t like how they look at all!

Pressure from the media, family and peers to look a certain way is really unfair and harmful. It is never OK to make fun or talk in a nasty way about how someone looks. This is often called ‘body-shaming’.

There are no two bodies in the whole world that are the exact same, and there are millions of different ways to look and be beautiful! Beauty is so much more than our looks – it lies within our personality, sense of humour, talents, quirks, intelligence, how we make others feel, our kindness, silliness, bravery – everything that makes you YOU!

The following are a series of videos from a fabulous site called Amaze.org that explain body image in a bit more detail! They take just over six minutes to watch – but are super informative!

There can be different pressures for boys and girl when it comes to body image – for instance, there can be pressure on boys to be strong and tall, while there might be pressure on girls to be slim in places and bigger in other places! The idea that someone should look a certain way because of what bits they have between their legs is ridiculous! It is time for this to change, so everyone feels free to look how they like.

Experts have found that girls experience more difficulty in accepting and loving their bodies – here is a great little video looking at two body parts that girls can worry about a lot – breasts! It is called ‘Does Breast Size Really Matter?’ (spoiler alert: it doesn’t!).

Finally, here is another fabulous video by Allure, proving that beauty looks and feels different to everyone!

We hope that made you smile as much as we did!

Here is Grace again – she says ‘beauty’ and ‘beautiful’ A LOT and wants to say goodbye and thank you for watching!