Open any teen magazine and you'll see models with lustrous hair, shiny lips, and gleaming, slender limbs. And for every girl in the magazine, there are thousands of girls in real life, reading and absorbing the messages found inside.

"I just remember we'd be getting ready for dances in middle school, and we'd be like 'What bra is sexier? Which jeans make my butt look better,'" said Maranda Barry, a senior at Marin Academy in San Rafael.

Barry remembers poring over Seventeen magazine long before she was even a teen.

"When I was 11, to get my hands on a copy of Seventeen would have been like heaven," explained Barry.

She says at that age, she had no idea the girls inside were anything but real.

"I didn't fully understand it all. It never occurred to me that in real life, they probably looked like me," said Barry.

Now, a 14-year-old girl from Maine is trying to get Seventeen magazine to change it ways and stop feuling girls' ideas of "perfection" with doctored photos.

Her online petition asks the magazine "...to commit to printing one unaltered -- real -- photo spread per month." The online petition has more than 70,000 signatures.

When KTVU asked for a response from publishers for this story, Seventeen magazine sent KTVU a statement that read: "We feature real girls in our pages and there is no other magazine that highlights such a diversity of size, shape, skin tone and ethnicity."

Seventeen would not commit to making any changes.

KTVU found Seventeen magazine was as familiar as tutus and tights to the girls at the East Bay Dance Center in Oakland.

But even though these girls read the magazine, they say they do so with a skeptical eye.

11-year-old Tati Santiago of Oakland said her friends and parents tell her not to chase an unrealistic body image that only exists on paper.

"They told me that you can't just change your body to look one way, because that way is going to be out of style, and then you have to change again," said Santiago.

Another ballet student, Maddy Bank of Oakland, said an analyzation of media class she took helped reveal the process that starts with a picture and ends in a cover shot.

"These people aren't real people," said Bank. "They're just fake."

But Connie Sobczac, founder of The Body Positive, told KTVU too many girls look at pictures in magazines and ask "Why don't I look like that?"

Her organization works to counter the magazines' messages which she feed dangerous, even potentially deadly, behavior.

Parents tell her devastating stories about children as young as three years old coming home and saying "Mommy, I'm fat."

Sobczac said the quest for perfection can lead impressionable young girls to behaviors ranging from self-hatred to self-destruction.

According to the National Eating Disorders Association, nearly 10 million females in the United States are battling eating disorders such as anorexia and bulimia.

The group says the peak onset happens during puberty and the late teen/early adult years, but symptoms can occur as young as kindergarten.

"I think what's changed is the awareness. The age of awareness -- of the body as something to hate -- has gotten younger," said Sobczac.

Sobczac said she ignores the magazines and even covers them up at the supermarket. Through The Body Positive, she's trained more than 1,000 peer leaders who go to schools and talk to youth about how to love themselves no matter what. She argues that's the greatest protection against being judged.

Sobczak told KTVU she's not hopeful society will stop judging girls, but said if she can teach the girls to love themselves, maybe the girls can one day change society.