We figure out how to love yourself for who you are.
Recently, on the Internet and on the pages of magazines dedicated to beauty and health, the words “fat shaming” and “body positive” have been flashing more and more often. The first of them denotes discrimination against overweight people, and the second expresses the idea of accepting your body as it is – with all its extra or missing kilograms. Even if these terms are not too euphonious for a Russian’s ear, they themselves have become an indicator that society is increasingly paying attention to a common problem that many do not even suspect about, while others know too well.
People who are not overweight often do not suspect that they have to endure their fat friends and colleagues. Many people naively think that fat shaming, or, if you like, bullying fat people, is expressed only in direct insults and ridicule – when children turn around or point a finger, adults who are not too educated make offensive comments, and more restrained ones do the same to themselves.
In fact, modern society is simply permeated with fat shaming – both as a whole and at the level of its individual representatives. This world is too small and inconvenient for overweight people: it is difficult for them to squeeze into a standard cinema or airplane chair, they cannot buy clothes in a regular store, and the outfits in specialized stores are more like sacks for potatoes …
Even polite and well-mannered people, without realizing it, are connected to the persecution of fat people. For example, when a fat person goes to the doctor, except perhaps the ophthalmologist or dentist, he knows in advance that he will be told: “What did you want with such a weight?”. Or another example, quite real – an endocrinologist, seeing a fat patient, did not even ask what she was complaining about. Instead, ahs began, exclamations: “Oh, you urgently need to lose weight! You urgently need to limit your food! You are young, you will have heart problems, diabetes and so on. ” But the girl was not going for that. Why poke her nose into what she already knows very well – she herself understands all the risks that obesity entails, especially since she had to listen to such a tirade more than once or twice. Agree, it would be strange if a person with a broken arm, coming to the doctor’s appointment, immediately heard: “Oh, your arm is broken! Oh, you urgently need to treat her, otherwise you will die! ” Funny? Funny. But for some reason, in a situation with a fat person, exactly the same thing is perceived as a completely natural thing.
A separate category of fat-shamers is good friends and relatives. “Oh, my mom lost 20 kg in three months, she was on such a great diet, I can tell you.” “I’ve read about diet pills, maybe you should try it too?” “Would you like to have stomach reduction surgery?” Believe me, all these well-meaning tips only hit below the waist – any fat person can lecture on weight loss theory, and many have solid practical experience. The fact is that it is not so difficult to lose weight as to maintain weight: it is difficult to continue living in a mode of restrictions when the goal seems to have been achieved. And about a separate category of relatives, fat-shamers, it is worth mentioning especially: they are loving parents. Of course, it is stupid to blame mom and dad for your failures, but the fact remains: it is they who often form a negative attitude towards their body in a child from childhood.
“If you are fat, no one will love you, you need to lose weight.” Millions of little girls have heard this phrase from their mothers. And not only heard – they saw confirmation of her: they were teased at school, laughed at, they really did not love, although they did nothing wrong to anyone. Loving mothers, without knowing it, raised their daughters with the thought “this world and all its charms are not for fat people”. It is daughters – in relation to fat men, society is much more complacent, but it is not ready to spare fat women. And the phrase was pronounced with the best intentions – to convince that you need to lose weight, and then happiness is in your pocket. As they grew up, girls perceived as the norm that they were avoided by men and blamed themselves for everything. There were also those who married the first person they met, even if he was a complete scoundrel – after all, the fact that at least someone paid attention to them, they perceived as a miracle, they knew from childhood that “no one likes fat people”. But here’s the paradox: these same girls, who since childhood were instilled with the idea that they don’t like fat people, often looked with surprise at their cheerful, popular, self-confident classmates who were just as fat as themselves. And the answer to the question “How do they do it?” was easy for an adult and insoluble for a child: these very girls were simply loved and supported, of course, not “if you lose weight,” but as they are, here and now.
Of course, mothers-fat-shamers also really loved their daughters, but they were constantly reminded of the condition under which one could become happy. At the same time, they, as a rule, did nothing that could help the girls to bring their weight back to normal. The fact is that losing weight is always a certain limitation and effort. You have to eat smaller portions of food and exercise, and this is a fat child, who is hard at physical education lessons, clearly does not want to do this. Conscious motivation comes only later, when a person realizes (sometimes after the onset of ailments) that fullness is an additional load on the heart, spine, endocrine system, joints, and, in fact, on the entire body; that losing weight means extending your life. In childhood, all these are empty words. And mothers with the best intentions, continuing to say that they don’t like fat people, baked pies, bought sweets and ice cream – after all, this is a child, he must be pampered. And even if they suddenly rushed to the other extreme and began to cook “vegetables”, saying that you can eat as many vegetables as you want, they didn’t even think about how much vegetable oil they added to this “low-calorie” dish.
Meanwhile the only way to help a child lose weight is to start doing it with him, even if the parents themselves do not suffer from obesity. Father and mother set an example to follow, and if mom likes to drink tea with gingerbread in the evening, and dad falls on the sofa with chips after a hard day, it is unlikely that the son or daughter will be delighted with the sight of a plate of boiled broccoli. Prepare only healthy food for the whole family, free the refrigerator from harmful and unnecessary foods, go hiking together, go swimming, run, just with your child – this is the only way your daughter or son will gradually reduce body weight. A good option is to simultaneously enroll the child in the sports section with a relatively gentle, but effective load, best of all for swimming or cycling. You can also find a suitable children’s group at the fitness club. But the gym of the same fitness club is not a place for children: a simulator for a child is akin to torture, since it does not bring joy, does not help to discover new things or achieve something. And worst of all, if the mother, having brought her daughter to the club, just sits and reads, and does not study with her.
The answer to the discrimination of obese people was bodypositive – a movement that defends the human right to be what he is… And this is not only about fat people – his supporters strive to instill a respectful attitude towards any appearance that differs from the imposed standards of beauty. If a woman prefers to walk with unshaven legs and at the same time shaves her hair on her head, this is her own business, and she can look the way she wants. At the same time, body positive does not at all prohibit losing weight, using cosmetics, going to a solarium and resorting to other benefits of the beauty industry – it is important that all this happens solely at the request of the woman herself, and not under the influence of other people’s views or preferences.
Of course, there are extremes everywhere, and among the supporters of this movement there are also those who have gone into reverse discrimination. They condemn those who do anything at all to their body, such as shaving their bikini area, armpits, or plucking their eyebrows. Unfortunately, all body positive is often associated with representatives of these extreme views, claiming that its followers do not wash, do not take care of themselves and are in a state of complete degradation. Such an idea does not correspond to reality, although there are indeed supporters of extremes, but extremes are always bad.
Rђ RІRѕS, American Whitney Thor Is a good example of a truly positive attitude towards your body. On the Internet, she became famous as a “dancing fat woman”: a video in which a girl weighing 170 kg performs an incendiary dance became a hit and gained more than 7 million views. Whitney has always been slim, she was a professional dancer, but after doctors diagnosed her with polycystic ovary disease, she quickly began to gain weight. For a long time, Whitney fought overweight – she lost a lot of weight, but then the kilograms returned, and everything had to start all over again. After a few years, Whitney decided to accept herself as she is, rightly deciding that a full person can live a full life. It doesn’t matter if you are thin or fat, Whitney believes – everyone has the right to be happy and do what brings him joy. She founded the anti-discrimination movement against obese No Body Shame and continues to practice dancing, she has a group of female students who are inspired by Whitney’s example and her skill. In addition, Whitney has a great success in the TLC show “My Full Life”, which airs on Thursdays at 23:00 pm. This program shows how she lives, how she builds relationships with friends, boyfriend and parents – in short, how she lives a full life.