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Something was wrong with Liz. In a best-friend, instinctual way, I knew that there was something going on with her that she was afraid to tell me.

Her once high-spirited, outgoing, optimistic attitude had now been replaced with a reserved, irritable and withdrawn one. Her beautiful, glowing complexion was dimming, and her eyes were never in focus, distracted by an unknown cause.

She looked sick, and I could tell that she had been losing a significant amount of weight, despite the baggy clothes she wore to disguise her depleting body. When I asked her about these changes, she became defensive and disregarded my concern, but I could tell that there was definitely something going on inside her.

My frustration grew with her worsening condition. The concern I was feeling about Liz kept my mind off the things I usually really enjoyed, including my schoolwork.

About a month after I first started noticing these changes in Liz, my marketing teacher brought up an opportunity that caught my attention. It was a chance to work with a non-profit group on a project about positive body image and its role in the epidemic of eating disorders.

GO GIRLS! (Giving Our Girls Inspiration and Resources for Lasting Self-esteem) is a pilot project started by the National Eating Disorders Association, a non-profit organization in Seattle.

The GO GIRLS! project was created to educate students about how media communication can devastate individual self-esteem and positive body image. Under EDAP’s direction, I would learn to provide leadership in a project that would help teens like my best friend, and to teach others what they can do to help prevent eating disorders.

At the core of the GO GIRLS! project was a curriculum developed to familiarize young people with the basic facts about eating disorders and help them analyze societal influences on girls' self-esteem.

I had never before been presented with these kinds of materials in my education. I knew that this was probably the case with most other high school students, and I saw the need to bring what I had learned to them.

The information and critical thinking approach served as a springboard to community activism and outreach. This included assignments such as bringing in advertisements that portrayed unrealistic body images and keeping journals of our thoughts as the first GO GIRLS! team. We also developed plans to attract positive media attention, hoping to influence others to focus on our mission.

I was one of the first students to join the GO GIRLS! project, and I've continued to provide leadership for our chapter ever since. After my second year as student coordinator for my high school, I went on to work with different schools in the state, and served as a representative to other schools in states across the nation.

The GO GIRLS! team met regularly every Tuesday morning for a 50-minute group conference. Led by an EDAP representative, these sessions were open and informal but with the promise of confidentiality.

After a beginning phase of group discussion and information-gathering, our first community action was a letter-writing campaign to advertisers who targeted a teen audience with unhealthy messages about beauty.

These were advertisements found in national magazines including Cosmopolitan, Teen and Glamour. We shared our apprehensions with their messages and provided them with information about how they could change their ads to avoid these concerns.

We informed them about what teenagers actually thought of their ads, and that we wanted to see the true diversity of beauty. Several of these companies pleasantly surprised us by canceling or changing their ads in response to our campaign.

Encouraged by the enormous amount of positive feedback, we wanted to expand the GO GIRLS! project to other schools. The more people that we could reach with our information and our messages, the more empowered and educated teens would be to pressure advertisers to change their message.

GO GIRLS! focused on department store mannequins, magazine ads, fashion shows and many other sites where negative body image messages were being projected. Several large department stores agreed to include more varied and realistic body types in their upcoming fashion shows.

Companies were starting to hear about the GO GIRLS! team even before we had a chance to communicate with them. Requests for interviews and media coverage came pouring in. Media exposure allowed the team to share the messages with an even greater audience.

The GO GIRLS! project taught me about the effects of the media on body image, what we can do about it, and how to teach other students to battle this negative force.

On the personal side, being involved in the GO GIRLS! team helped me learn to be an even better friend to Liz. The program taught me about what was going on with her and how I could be supportive in her path to recovery.

As a member of the Lifestyle Advisor team at Western Washington University, I have been able to bring the messages and lessons of the GO GIRLS! program to my college campus.

Although we now attend different schools, Liz and I are still very close. I have named her an honorary GO GIRL! for her commitment to teaching others about the dangers of negative body image through her own experiences in fighting eating disorders. My hope is that all the people who have benefited from this project will share what they’ve learned from others.