Body Shaming and Self Love

Body shaming. Discriminating someone for their body type. Judging them. Making accusations.

In the last two decades, body shaming has seen an increase, spreading across young girls and boys and is linked to the increased risk of eating disorders, according to Psychology Today. The article points at bringing awareness to the ‘Healthy at Every Size’ movement, described as a ‘political movement that supports people in adopting health habits for the sake of health and well-being’.

Body shaming is a phenomenom that has been around way before social media however. Remember that kid everybody used to make fun of in school calling him fat? I thought so. What people don’t realize is that body shaming doesn’t only target “fat” people. It targets everyone, from the girl who is way too “skinny” to the girl who has what might appear as huge legs from all the training she does. In part, it’s not our fault, it’s what we’ve been taught from the beginning. As kids, we were given Barbie dolls, with perfect hair, tiny waist and a “thigh gap”. We were told that eating too much food will make you fat and then nobody will like you. We were told that the only thing that mattered was on the outside.

Barbie, but with the ‘average body shape’ for American women (Copyright Nikolay Lamm)

Truth is, there is no actual definition for “beauty”. According to one of the many definitions on the Urban Dictionary, beauty is ‘a corporate invention designed to promote the suffering and insecurity of the masses for the sake of the profit’. Every woman is beautiful in her own way, no matter what her body type. Because, believe it or not, the body is not the only thing we have. We are lucky enough to be the combination of all the different traits in our family history and yet be unique by what we have inside.

As a kid, I remember loads of girls at my school (myself included) being body shamed because we weren’t as thin as the ‘popular girls’. Today, those popular girls are being told “She’s too thin, she should eat something” or “with a body like that, she must be a slut”. With the rise of social media and celebrity culture, body shaming has reached a whole new level, with people attacking perfectly healthy women and making them feel insecure of their bodies.