Society lies, choose to be alive

Society lies, choose to be alive is the first project of FED (Fight Eating Disorders). Our initiative with Society lies, choose to be alive is to put up non-destructive glass-cling stickers on public mirrors (in bathrooms, dressing rooms, etc.) which link to this website.

These are our stickers. You may have seen them, in fact, that may be why you’re on our website!

Our story

This project was started because our founder and creator, Sabrina, struggled with Anorexia Nervosa and came out the other side with a burning passion to help others struggling with eating disorders (EDs) and body image distress. You can read about her personal journey in About Us.

Sabrina saw a picture on Pinterest that inspired this project. She saw an image of a mirror that had a very similar message written on it to the one we used on our glass-cling sticker. After seeing that, Sabrina carried it in her mind, she wrote it on mirrors in her house, sent the image to her friends and family. She thought it was the best quote. She kept thinking about it. When Sabrina was on a trip in the summer of 2024. She saw a small sticker on the frame of a mirror in a consignment store.

By this point she had already started thinking about making stickers similar to this for her home town, but this pushed her over the edge. For the next few months Sabrina continued to think about it until one night she was thinking about what project she should do for a Girl Scout project (a Silver Award) that she only had a couple months left to complete. So she opened up a form and submitted an application to start this project.

Much like how she had been thinking about the stickers for a long time, Sabrina had been thinking about her Girl Scout Silver Award project for even longer. It’s a large project, you need 50 hours of work and the project has to make a lasting difference in the world. Sabrina had had a ton of ideas but each one had fizzled out. So when she got a burst of excitement about this sticker project, she sat down at 10pm and filled out the form, submitting it at midnight with the buzz of passion and a new name for the project pounding through her veins: Society lies, choose to be alive.

The title Society lies, choose to be alive references how society’s expectations are unrealistic and if we are always comparing ourselves to them we will spend our whole life surviving for someone else, or rather, something else and never actually living for ourself.

Society lies, choose to be alive‘s objective was to create our stickers and have them link to this website. We wanted a website with reliable information on Eating Disorders, body image distress, recovery, and our mission.

8 months before any of this happened, Sabrina, in her 8th grade year of school, was asked to do a project. She was allowed to pick any topic. Naturally, she chose eating disorder (ED) awareness. She created pamphlets and a slideshow presentation to explain the concept, dangers and recovery process of EDs to her class in school. She shared it with her class as well as going into a local elementary school and talking to some of their 6th grade students. This information was then edited and reformatted to be used on this website.

What do we see for our future?

We would like to continue producing our stickers and eventually have them up internationally. We would love to work with groups in other countries to do this. If you’re interested in collaborating with us you can find our business email under Support.