Body Image

We're happy to present this post from our partner site Yahoo! Shine:

Jennifer Wayland, 15, who attends Parkway Central High in Chesterfield, MO, quietly existed in a lonely well of low self-esteem, shame about her body, and, as she puts it, the feeling that she "took up too much space." Then she found the courage to tell her mom, and so began the tough road back to regaining control of her health and self-confidence.

The ninth grader earned a prestigious award for the compelling essay she wrote on her struggle with body image and disordered eating. On May 1, Sharon Robinson, the daughter of baseball legend Jackie Robinson, presented Wayland with the grand prize in the Jackie Robinson Breaking Barriers essay contest, sponsored by Major League Baseball and Scholastic. The other grand prize winner was Luke Lunday, a fifth grader who has cerebral palsy and shared his determination to ride a bicycle on his own. The contest received more than 18,000 submissions.

Read on to learn more about Jennifer's heartfelt story.

We're happy to present this story from one of our favorite sites, Fox News Magazine.

When reality TV star Kourtney Kardashian told boyfriend Scott Disick that she was struggling to lose weight, his response left something to be desired.

"Ugh, I feel like 93 (pounds) is the dream," Disick told the petite 33-year-old, sparking a public backlash.

In Kardashian's case, it was pregnancy weight that was making her feel insecure, but it isn't uncommon for women to pack on pounds when they enter into a relationship. In fact, a recent study concluded that couples living together were more likely to become obese.

Ask Diana: My Friend Is Still in Love With Her Married Ex

But when is it OK for your partner to weigh in? And is brutal honesty helpful or hurtful?

"Nobody EVER loses weight because of being criticized by a loved one, in fact the opposite is true," says Nina Atwood, therapist and author of "Soul Talk." "Criticism diminishes self-esteem, and low self-esteem is related to increased weight problems. Brutal honesty is hurtful in this situation because it hurts the relationship by signaling lack of acceptance. When you love someone, you are supportive. Love is acceptance, so if the person you love accepts you, his only job is to continue loving you," she adds.

"Many people think that being hurtful will motivate someone to do something faster," says relationship expert Lindsay Kriger. "It's possible that your partner wants you to lose weight, but isn't sure how else to get you to do it. I have heard a wife call her husband a 'fat pig' before. Instead of being a motivating force, it causes people to shut down, do the opposite or develop resentment and anger towards the criticizer."

There may be many reasons a man would address his partner's weight gain, ranging from loss of attraction to being controlling, but it could be as simple as genuine concern.

"Sometimes we need to get things off our chest and we don't know how to express something that is bothering us," explains Marina Pearson, founder of Divorce Shift and author of "Goodbye Mr. Ex." "I believe we are always doing the best we can with the resources we have. Being hurt by another person's opinion is something to look at. And something to remember is that we are only hurt by something we judge about ourselves."

Of course, it can be difficult to discuss such weighty issues without hurt feelings.

"There has to be a way to talk about the situation without blaming or criticizing," says Beverly Hills-based psychotherapist Dr. Fran Walfish. "It's very important to acknowledge out loud that you're feeling hurt. It's also important to take an honest look at yourself and ask if there's any way your partner can talk about this without you getting defensive. The person delivering the critique also needs to ask, 'Why do I care so much?' And the receiving person should hopefully be open enough to do self-exploration and understand why they're overweight. Discussing the matter could actually make couples feel more bonded."

On the other hand, Atwood says if your partner can't be supportive, kick him to the curb.

"If your partner tells you that you are fat, lose the partner first, then work on yourself," says Atwood. "You should never put up with being criticized in a hurtful way. You may be allowing him to stay in your life because he reflects the bad feelings you have about yourself. To accomplish positive goals, you must first accept yourself, be honest with yourself in a caring way and then only allow supportive people close to you."

More from Fox News Magazine:

• How to Really Help an Unemployed Friend
• How Children of Painful Divorce Can Seek Closure As Adults
• Six Signs He's Not the One

If you want to have a positive impact on your body image, you might have a better luck trading chick lit in for high-fashion magazines. A study released recently found that book characters can negatively influence body image, while another found that Hollywood's standards aren't as powerful as you would think.

Researchers at Virginia Tech looked into the impact chick lit can have on a woman's body esteem and found that when a protagonist expresses negative feelings about her body, it has a negative impact on the reader's own concerns about her weight. Reading modified passages from Something Borrowed by Emily Giffin and Dreaming in Black and White by Laura Jensen Walker, the study participants felt less sexually attractive themselves when they read about slim women and more insecure when reading about a character with body insecurities.

Meanwhile, at Texas A&M International University, researchers concluded that exposure to television and social media do not predict eating disorders or dissatisfaction with your own body. Rather, peer competition and not Hollywood's narrow beauty ideal leads to negative body image, suggesting young women compare themselves more harshly to their friends than their favorite celebrities.

On the surface, these two completely independent studies seem to find opposite conclusions about the impact of media on a woman's body image. One says characters in books have an impact, while the other says it is our real-life peers, not the images we see in the media, that influence how we feel about ourselves. But looking at them together, the findings could indicate that unlike celebrities or television characters, women relate to characters in literature similarly to how they relate to their real-life peers. I think we just found a topic for a new study.

• UK study: seeing plus-size models reduces obsession with thinness — HuffPost Women
• 14 honest breakup lines — The Frisky
• 5 men's products that are clearly women's products — Cracked
• Vintage love letters found among Hurricane Sandy debris — YourTango
• Anna Karenina is beautiful and heartless — Newser
• The 7 best kind of kisses — CollegeCandy
• The cast of Modern Family's Hollywood weight makeover — The Daily Beast
• Meghan McCain might consider switching political parties — The Jane Dough
• What can you send men instead of flowers? — Glamour

While some women — celebrities and otherwise — may not be able to find the right words to fight back against mean-spirited comments about their appearance, when Ashley Judd was hit with remarks that attacked her "puffy" face and weight gain, she had a great response. During the last month or so, Ashley has been in the public eye for her swollen-looking face that some have concluded must mean she's getting plastic surgery done. But the sad reality is it's really a side effect from the steroid medications she's been taking for illness. Ashley Judd wrote a piece on The Daily Beast that took the rebuttal to a whole new, feminist — and empowered — level. In the smart essay, she takes on the naysayers by pointing out how our culture's obsession with women's outer looks are a misogynistic attack on our sex. Here are some of our favorite points:

• For women, it's all about the outward appearance: "We are described and detailed, our faces and bodies analyzed and picked apart, our worth ascertained and ascribed based on the reduction of personhood to simple physical objectification. Our voices, our personhood, our potential, and our accomplishments are regularly minimized and muted."
• Sexism against women comes from both sexes: "Patriarchy is not men. Patriarchy is a system in which both women and men participate. It privileges, inter alia, the interests of boys and men over the bodily integrity, autonomy, and dignity of girls and women. It is subtle, insidious, and never more dangerous than when women passionately deny that they themselves are engaging in it."
• Striving for beauty is a lose-lose situation: "I ask especially how we can leverage strong female-to-female alliances to confront and change that there is no winning here as women. It doesn't actually matter if we are aging naturally, or resorting to surgical assistance. We experience brutal criticism. "
• This constant critique of women's appearance affects more than we realize: "It affects each and every one of us, in multiple and nefarious ways: our self-image, how we show up in our relationships and at work, our sense of our worth, value, and potential as human beings."