Abby Kaufmann looked liked the typical teenager hanging out with friends over burgers and pizza at The Loop restaurant May 6.

But Abby was out to dinner with a greater cause in mind. She was celebrating “No Diet Day” with about 85 of her closet friends.

The internationally recognized day — started in 1992 — celebrated at the Cary restaurant was an informal event to kick off the launch of the 14-year-old’s nonprofit group NoBODY’s Perfect.

The organization is designed to promote body-image and raise awareness of negative body-images and poor media portrayals of what people “should” look like.

“It’s really taken off,” the Cary eighth-grader said of the group that she started about a month ago.

Through the organization, which now mostly counts Kaufmann as its main member, she hopes to raise awareness about body-issue problems.

Even at 14, Abby knows much about the issue, having gone through her own struggles with anorexia nervosa.

It all started around her 12th birthday, when Abby started to realize that her desire to keep calories and her weight down were interfering with her life.

“I started to realize it was getting a little out of control,” she said.

It eventually got so far “out of control” that Abby was hospitalized in spring 2006 and then spent months in treatment in the Triangle and Arizona.

But never once did she think she was fat, Abby noted, wanting to clear up the misconception that anorexia is just about wanting to be skinny.

For her, counting calories and seeing how much weight she could drop was like a competition and a distraction from some of the other issues going on in her life.

She doesn’t like to get specific on those issues or say say how skinny she got. She knows that suffering anorexics could use those numbers in an unhealthy way to compete against themselves. She did.

She said that it was her family and friends who helped her get better. She also thinks that starting the organization will be a positive reinforcement to keep her on track.

Not that the organization is all about eating disorders. She hopes to use it as an advocacy group to educate on all body-image issues.

“Hardly anybody feels 100 percent with their body,” Abby said, noting that many girls her age feel they don’t measure up to the unrealistic standards of beauty presented by the media and fashion magazines.

For now Abby’s got her own fashion plans for her new organization.

By the end of 2008, she hopes to have a fashion show including people of all ages, sizes, weights, colors, heights and complexions.

She also hopes to have meetings and give speeches on the body-issue topics.