These days, it seems like everyone is obsessed with being perfect. We want perfect hair, perfect clothes, the perfect house, the perfect friends, a perfect family, and on and on. Something we seem to be particularly obsessed with is achieving the perfect body. In most pop culture circles, for women that seems to mean being thin, but still having “curves in all the right places”. Like the picture to the left…
Our society has tricked us into believing that we should do anything and everything we can in order to make ourselves fit into this mould. Sometimes the methods suggested are good habits like eating healthily and exercising. But somewhere along the way it all went wrong & healthy eating turned into eating disorders, exercising for health turned into over exercising out of guilt and shame. Now, to be perfectly clear, I am not bashing people who have naturally thin bodies or are fit because they do eat healthily and work-out. That would be completely counterproductive. What I’m saying is that our society has become so obsessed with “thinness” & that it has gotten out of hand. What I’ve said so far shouldn’t be breaking news to anyone. We know this a problem. But I want to bring to light something you may not be aware of, and what I wasn’t fully aware of until pretty recently.
There are a a few different of names for it, but the one I’m going to use today is “fat-shaming”. Society tells us, sometimes subtly sometimes not, that fat people are “worth” less than thin people. That they are less attractive, less lovable. That they are lazy and even selfish. They are told that if they don’t lose weight they will die from a myriad of different diseases and conditions. They are told that they are unhealthy based solely on their appearance. In 99% of cases this doesn’t do anything to help them! It just hurts. I should know, because I’ve been fat since I was about 13 years old.
Ever since I’ve known I was fat I’ve been, off & on, trying to change it. I went on my first diet at age 14. I spent hours researching online what I should be eating and how much, and what exercises I should be doing. I found some healthy things, and some extreme things. Thankfully, I never went for the extreme. I did, however, yo-yo back and forth between plain grilled chicken on salads with no dressing and double cheeseburgers with onion rings for years. & for years I would beat myself up when I’d eat that cheeseburger, even though it was just an occasional thing. & I’d look in the mirror or at a picture of myself & I’d hate what I saw. It eventually got to the point that I just avoided mirrors and cameras altogether. So, did all this self hatred motivate me to lose the weight? Nope. Sure didn’t. For some people shame is a motivator but, like I said earlier, for me (& I would dare say for most people like me) it just hurt.
So hop in your time-machine of choice & travel forward 5 more years to the present. In those 5 years I’ve not been within 100 pounds of what’s considered “healthy”. & I’ve been diagnosed with clinical depression and mild social anxiety to boot. I’ve gotten so tired of being told “Well if you just lost the weight...” and “Do you really want to eat that?”, sometimes from my own family, that I’ve basically shut myself off from the world emotionally. That’s what you fat-shaming has done world – to so many women and girls. It does not push us closer to health; it throws more obstacles in our way.
To be continued.....
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