You walk into a room and you are instantly judged.

If it's not bad enough that you are being judged, you are also being compared - compared to people like Selena Gomez, Miley Cyrus and Kim Kardashian, beautiful women with amazing bodies and seemingly no visible flaws.

And you start to feel pressured - pressured to be skinny, to be the type of beautiful that the media portrays.

But this beauty isn't normal. I mean, these women have personal trainers and strict diets, not to mention some very gracious genetic makeups.

So why are we, the average teenagers, being compared to them? Why is the media demanding such a high, unfair standard of beauty that people are comparing us, the average teen, to these people?

So what do you think beauty is; what defines it? If you are not as skinny as a Victoria's Secret model, are you not skinny enough?

There are commercials and billboards with tiny girls in even tinier bikinis telling us that this is beauty. And what about magazines with "best and worst beach body comparisons" - a celebrity has a tiny bit of a stomach or her thighs don't look perfect in one picture and she is automatically landed on the worst-body list.

So if we don't have a tiny stomach or tight thighs are we too big? The media would consider us too big and they would make some clever remark about us needing a diet.

Most of this debate has been focused on the ladies, but what about the guys? It may not be as obvious, but teenage boys are pressured by the media as well.

Seeing washboard abs, big biceps and rock-hard pecks forces guys to waste hours grunting away in the gym. You may say this is all well and good, because they are getting healthy and getting exercise.

That may be true, but what if they don't get big enough, fast enough? Then turning to things like steroids or other mind or body stimulants could seem like the only other option.

And what could seem like an innocent attempt to mirror the media's portrayal of a good looking body may, in extreme cases, turn into a life-threatening addiction landing you in a hospital or buried six feet under pushing up daisies.

So instead of ending up looking like Ryan Gosling or an Abercrombie and Fitch model, you end up in rehab, in the hospital or dead.

But you must remember the media doesn't care what happens to us; we are the little people.

They want to keep their unrealistic views on what is in shape, skinny or beautiful; they want to keep their crude views on what is considered a plus size.

So we need to remember that the media needs us - if we realize what true beauty is, that totally buff men or super-skinny girls aren't the norm - and if we reject their ideas then maybe we can help change the media's unrealistic views.

. Anneka Ekelund is a student at Pinetree Secondary in Coquitlam.