How Does College Affect Body Image?

It’s one of life’s most momentous rites of passage. Every August young adults shed their status in high school and enthusiastically assume a new role as college freshmen (aka “first-years”). Starry-eyed, ambitious, and naively straddling puberty and adulthood, they are not necessarily prepared for newfound independence. And they are rarely prepared, it seems, for how college affects body image.

But hovering quietly over studies, friendships, and football games is an issue that enters and leaves college with every student. An issue that may have been, before now, relatively unacknowledged and rarely discussed by the student.

Body Image: Everybody Has One

Your body image has nothing to do with your body itself. It does, however, have everything to do with how you think and feel about it.

It’s about your with your body. And that relationship, like any other, is the combo of a lot of factors: upbringing, expectations, family, friends, culture.

What you see in the mirror isn’t necessarily what’s physically there, but a reflection of what you feel about it. While you look with your eyes, your mind “looks” with filters and judgments.

It comes as no surprise that body image is central to the lives of teens. Their bodies are changing rapidly (and…