Pills, Shots, Drinks, Plans, Surgery. All designed to make us skinny. Cut it off. Inject it off. Drink it off. Just get it off. At any cost.
From the 1950’s, when women were chewing laxatives after each meal to 2026, when every other woman is taking a shot of one kind or the other, it is all in the pursuit of skinny.
I grew up in the 80s and 90s when Fen-Phen and heroin chic were the things. I had friends as young as 14 years old taking those pills. All in the pursuit of skinny.
My mother grew up in the 60s and 70s when crash diets and amphetamines were all the rage. Under the influence of my grandmother, a product of the 50s, she was fed laxatives as a child. All in pursuit of skinny.
Females are twice as likely to develop an eating disorder as males.
Whether someone develops an eating disorder or not, the societal pressure for skinny has always found its way to the forefront. As females, we are taught from a very young age that our bodies are something to be viewed. Something that exists for someone else’s pleasure. That is a lie.
Personally, I had my own struggles and ideas about body image I had to work to undo, and sometimes still do. Because my mother struggled and felt the pressures from her own mother, luckily for me, she chose not to pass that on to me. She was always very deliberate in telling me I was not fat and did not need to be on a diet, despite my 12-year-old insistence that I was. Unfortunately, even though she tried to teach me not to worry so much about body image or dieting, I fell in line. The sad fact is, she didn’t have to make me believe I was fat and should be skinny. Society did that.
I know I’m not saying anything new here. We all know it’s a problem, yet we all still participate in one way or another.
I have entered a new phase of life where I am being kinder to myself because I realize that, as I am getting older, skinny never mattered. What mattered was HEALTHY. I have been overweight, underweight, and some were in the middle. I have the stubbornness and willpower to do it without any help from the plethora of solutions available, but I got real with myself recently. I asked myself who I was doing any of it for? And has any of it mattered to a point that it changed my life significantly?
Yes and no. The largest benefit came from going from overweight to a healthy weight. Not according to charts, according to how I felt. I felt my best when movement became easier, and my insides weren’t struggling to digest all of the crap I was putting in them. After that, it just became an arbitrary number on the scale or a smaller clothing size to aspire to. Because, you know, skinny.
I did the skinny thing for a while. A long while. It wasn’t bad to be skinny, but the return on my time and effort in the pursuit of skinny did not add up to it being worth it.
Now I ask myself, how do I feel? Sure, I still want to “look good,” but it’s not the top priority anymore. I have also found that when I feel good, I tend to also look good. It’s all subjective, of course, what looks good. But what really brought it home for me was asking myself some questions.
Even though my mother struggled with her weight, did I ever look at her and wish she looked different? No. Have I ever loved anyone in my life less because of their weight? No. Does wearing a size zero feel any better than wearing a size 4? No. However, I will admit the hardwiring of worrying about sizes still creeps in. But if you were to change all size 4 tags to size zero, I would be happy as a clam, and that’s how I know it doesn’t really matter.
These realizations help me to keep the skinny script in check. I plan to live the rest of my life in pursuit of health. I want to feel good when I move, feel good when I eat, and most of all, enjoy my life in this body without worrying if I am taking up too much space or if I look good according to whatever society is claiming is beautiful right now.
I believe beauty is joy that others can see and feel.
Show me someone of any size, any weight, who is joyful and convince me they aren’t beautiful. You can’t do it.
Sources:
https://www.nationaleatingdisorders.org/statistics/
Very well written..