Body Image and Size-ism.

In my attempts to procrastinate finishing my Statement of Purpose for graduate school applications, I decided a blog would be much more fun to write. Ahhh, gotta love the internet and it’s wonderful powers.

Yesterday my best friend had the lap band surgery. To my surprise, she was awake, chipper, and in a extremely happy disposition not long after the procedure. This has been a long and tedious journey for her that I don’t think enough people fully appreciate. 


I always considered Becky a confident and strong person and I’m only realizing now that there were deeper issues at hand. I feel selfish as a friend for not recognizing earlier her true unhappiness and lack of self-confidence about her body. She wanted help and I don’t feel like I always offered her that…perhaps because it has become such a taboo subject or perhaps because of my problems with my own body image. What makes me even sadder is that the root of her unhappiness (like many people) was tied to her body and her weight.

Perhaps her pseudo-confidence was an attempt to hide or escape discussion about her weight…and she has good reason to feel that way. They ways in which we talk about size/weight in our society are atrocious, dangerous, and damaging. When individuals begin tying their self-worth to their bodies, they see their outward appearance as a representation of not just their successes and failures, but who they are (If this statement interests you, read “Perfect Girls Starving Daughters”; it’s amazing).

“Fat” is not who Becky is and I never have or never will see her like that. I believe Becky is absolutely beautiful…and not in the “beautiful on inside and out” way, because really, that’s bullshit and no one likes hearing that cliché. It suggests that the beauty on the inside makes up for the lack of beauty on the outside and that’s not how I see Becky. While, yes, she is a “beautiful person on the inside” with a heart made of gold, she is also physically beautiful. I hope she realizes that both now and when she begins to lose weight. She will be just as beautiful then as she is now; there is no number on a scale that can take that away from her.  She taught me that. When I was suffering some severe body image problems, Becky made the jump, unsure of how I would respond, and talked to me about it. She did what I should have done for her.

I know she is doing this for her future and health, not just because society tells her she needs to lose weight (she’s always been good at dismissing societal norms). I hope she finds love, but I hope she finds that it exists for the right reasons. I hope a year from now the past ex-boyfriends and potential ex’s that came in and out of her life look back and regret walking out on a great thing. Not because she lost weight and now they see her in a new light, but because they realize they had the problem, not her. They were the ones so unsure of who THEY were and that they couldn’t and didn’t fully appreciate who she was/is. I hope the love she finds appreciates and welcomes the trials and tribulations she went through to get to where she will be. I hope they look at old pictures of her and say, “you were just as beautiful then as you are now”.

As this journey unfolds, I hope the stresses caused by her body image disappear. I hope she gets upset over issues completely unrelated to her body, I hope she cries about them like she has in the past over her weight. I hope she  goes days, weeks even, without worrying about her weight or her body. More importantly, I hope she soon sees what I’ve always seen: a strong, beautiful woman. (Are you tired of hearing that yet, Becky?) Because Becky is someone I strive to be like, someone I admire, someone I look up to. For her to fully understand where my admiration comes from, she must first love herself as much as her friends and family love her.

All of this has got me thinking, though. 

We, as a society, need to change the way we talk about weight. Fat is not and cannot be equated with laziness and thin cannot be equated with self-control; you will never know where someone comes from until you take a walk in their shoes. But this polar language we have about skinny and fat is the very thing setting us up for failure. Children are growing up believing that power is tied to their body, and women in particular allow this power to exist there because they fear they have no more powerful currency left in the world except our bodies.

I wish weight was not so important in our society. Eating disorders are at an all time high. Eating disorders are so dangerous because they teach people to tune out our internal signals, our wants, and our needs in an attempt for perfection. But what does it really mean to achieve a perfect body while never truly understanding the deeper issues that make us feel as though we need that perfect body? Our perceptions of self should not lie in what our bodies look like, but rather what those bodies can accomplish. People with eating disorders often question their worth in the world and instead of relying on their character and inner-self to define that, they look at their outside selves for continuous affirmation. They become convinced that the only accurate depiction of themselves is outside themselves. Their bodies become their enemy instead of their temple.

Men have it bad in the body image world, too, though. Men have begin to feel the pressure to fit into the mold of what is considered attractive. In the US, one million men have eating disorders (which is a 30% increase since 1972) and I suggest that reported number is inaccurately low due to the stigma of males having an eating disorder. 

The media shows us a very narrow standard of beauty, but if we accepted and appreciated  the sheer variety that bodies come in, women (and men) could focus more engery and thought into real issues. We are all chasing an imaginary body in some way, maybe because we know that “fat” is a societal death sentence. 50% of people polled by ELLEgirl said they would rather be skinny than healthy. Really?! It shouldn’t be that way, but it is and it stems from our misconceptions about what it means to be “fat”. 

How can we change this? I don’t know, it will take a lot of work and change in our everyday language. But we can start small; tomorrow, wear something that you find unflattering, you know, that shirt you bought and never wore because it shows your “love handles”. When you begin to feel uncomfortable in that piece of clothing, appreciate and embrace that feeling. Ask yourself why you truly feel so uncomfortable; what is making you feel that way? You will learn a lot about yourself in the answer.