It is often these days that we are shamed for how we look. Everyone seems to care about how you’re dressed, how expensive your shoes were, your hair and makeup, and even your weight. Weight has become a measure of health and on the internet especially, fat shaming is everywhere. Fat shaming damages people’s self-esteem and can even lead to depression.
Seen as social media posts and as comments, it seems like at every turn you see fatphobic ideas. Even fat shaming that isn’t outright is still painful and it hurts your self-esteem.
Fat shamers claim that they’re just worried about the person’s health, but no matter the intent, it’s the impact that matters. Gabriel Gavin from Psychology Today stated “Whilst bullying and negative portrayals of overweight people are often overlooked or implicitly condoned on the grounds that ‘it might help them to lose weight’, you probably need only look back to your school days for examples of bullying crushing confidence and isolating people. An analysis by the Centre for Advancing Health indicated that high school students who believed themselves to be overweight were much more likely than their classmates to suffer from depression or to attempt suicide.”
The issue that people are ignoring with fat shaming is that the shamers tend to think that people who are overweight don’t know that they are, so the comment might push them to make healthier choices. From someone who is overweight, I can tell you, I know. I know when I wake up in the morning and look in the mirror. I know when I stand on the scale. I know when I go to the doctor. People who are overweight don’t need your negative comments to “push” them to change their lifestyle and lose weight, because they’re already dealing with the negative voice inside of their head.
Why do we assume those being overweight means someone is unhealthy? Recently, health experts have started to determine that weight doesn’t always correlate to a person’s health. I personally know people who weigh much less than I do, but eat foods that don’t fuel their body well and never workout. According to an article by Patti Neighmond from NPR, a study found that “women who were routinely physically active and overweight were less likely to suffer heart problems than their normal weight counterparts who didn't exercise.” In general, your weight doesn’t show what’s going on on the inside.
When I was in high school, I suffered from chronic pain due to undiagnosed endometriosis. Within two years, I lost around 50 pounds, but I was the unhealthiest I’d ever been in my life. I had terrible anxiety, I was depressed, I could hardly keep food down because I had a stomach ulcer (from stress and too much ibuprofen), I was always tired due to chronic fatigue, and I was often anemic. I hated my body for hurting itself, but everywhere I went, people told me “you look so skinny” or “you’ve lost so much weight,” as if it was a good thing. Looking back, I know now that it definitely was not a good thing. You can tell I was sick in photos. Yes, I was skinny, but I wasn’t healthy.
Where does this obsession with weight come from? Our society’s obsession with weight stems from so many places. It is a problem both mentally and physically. Obviously, a lot of people who are overweight would be healthier if they lost weight, but our obsession with weight in society pushes people to go about losing weight in the wrong way, which causes even more mental and physical issues.
According to Julia Smagacz with The Huffington Post, “We associate weight loss with success. Fitness. Happiness. Beauty. Power. Weight gain, on the other hand, is rarely ever something to be celebrated. It’s inherently a bad, negative, stigmatized concept…I’m horrified that things such as fat shaming and body shaming exist nowadays, and are accepted. Perfectly normal, beautiful women are labeled as ‘plus-size’ and ‘unhealthy’ simply because they don’t match society’s definition of fitness and typical body shape.”
The obsession is what is unhealthy and those who fat shame or body shame others are probably doing it because of their own body insecurities. We need to start wrapping our brains around the idea that there is no perfect and healthy-looking body. We all have something we could do to improve our health- like getting more sleep or taking the stairs instead of the elevator. There needs to be a shift that happens where we stop worrying about what everyone else is doing with their bodies and worry about our own, because if we don’t stop shaming others for how they look, we will continue down a path of depression and low self-esteem, and that certainly isn’t healthy.
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