Miss Alabama Meg McGuffin visited Goshen High School Wednesday as part of the GEAR UP kickoff week. She spoke to the students about her platform, “Healthy is the New Skinny.”

“Comparison is the thief of joy,” McGuffin said. “You are your own worst enemy.”

McGuffin began by playing a trivia game with the students, telling them statistics about men and women and how they feel about their bodies. Approximately 91 percent of women are unhappy with how their bodies look, according to McGuffin. She even went on to say that more than.

“It’s your age group that society is targeting to try to make you feel like you are not enough,” McGuffin told the students. “You are enough. You are worth more than you will ever know. Stop allowing society’s definition of beauty to become yours.”

After introducing her platform, she told each student to pick a partner sitting nearby and compliment the partner on something other than appearance.

When asked if they were surprised by the compliments, a large amount of students raised their hands. Some were told they were great athletes, that they were smart or that they had a good personality.

“What if you could make someone else feel that way every single day?” McGuffin asked. “You could do that every day … I’m going to challenge each of you to do that.”

She also challenged the students to end the use of “fat talk.” While most of the students suggest that “fat talk” was bullying others about body weight, it is actually the opposite.

“We can bully other people all day, but do you know we bully ourselves the most?” McGuffin said. “Stop talking about yourself in a negative way. Start telling yourselves positive things and how much you love your body … and you’ll start to believe it.”

One last thing that she challenged the students to do was to stop getting on the scale.

“We’re going to let a square-foot piece of machinery tell us what we are worth and define our value in society? Ridiculous,” McGuffin said. “No, we are beautiful based on the way that we inspire other people, the way that we use our talents every day, the way that we make other people feel, but not by the way that we look.”

As students begin the GEAR UP program, they will be ready to be confident, not only academically, but be confident in themselves in all areas. McGuffin said that she hopes the students can take her challenges with them and develop positive thoughts about themselves.

“We are the generation that it ends with,” McGuffin said. “It’s our turn to redefine what beauty is.”