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Body Positive?

The Undercurrent in Our Overweight Epic

By Avi SatoPublished 6 years ago 9 min read
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I like to think of myself as outwardly accepting of others, regardless of my thoughts and feelings on their behaviors, beliefs, and beings. But there are three things that truly dishearten me about humans, myself included, I hasten to add and they’ve slotted themselves nicely into the unique-little-snowflake culture that has engulfed us millennials. They call themselves, in the style of a generation raised on spasmodic adspeak “body positive,” “you do you,” and “intellectual differences.” I’ve talked about the second and third before and intend to do so again in the near future but, for now, I’m going to focus on the first one.

What does it mean to be “body positive?” I see this as starting from a very good and healthy place. Fashion models, quite a few of who I have worked with and some have become good friends, are often unhealthily underweight and often, as a result of being pressured by an industry overwhelmingly full of men who believe that the target weight for a girl is twenty pounds, a target height of six-foot-three, and a target waist size of being able to wrap your hands around and touch thumbs and forefingers without difficulty, suffering from eating disorders both myriad and pervasive. This is a cultural problem and, with all of the talk about it, protesting about it, and even laws about it, it has not changed. Sure, there have been some token movements in the industry to show inclusion of what are often, although never publicly, called “imperfect women.” But it’s all shadow and mirrors with a touch of smoke – as if the fashion industry needed more smoking.

So it comes from a good place. And, as such, it is intensely easy for it to have been manipulated into something both grotesque and harmful – in this case, not simply harmful to people but specifically harmful to young people, which is a crime against humanity that I see few to rival.

The idea, simply put, is that a real human being is not necessarily light as a feather with no body fat. And as a concept, this is excellent. In practice, it would do well for the fashion industry to promote the standard of a woman who wears clothing that is not necessarily a zero, double-zero, or extra-small. Not that there is anything wrong with a woman who do wear such sizes. And this is where the shaming culture rears its ugly head. I’m a woman who wears extra-small. I am not underweight, eat full meals with healthy things like vegetables and lentils and rice, and attend things such as yoga and dance on a regular basis. I am, as people would say, a slim woman. Well, people would have said that. But now there’s the “You’re too thin, go eat something”, “Are you anorexic?” and “You should be ashamed of showing your body; young girls will try to be thin like you”. In my defense, you can’t fit your hands around my waist unless you have hands the size of dinner plates; my weight is measured into the hundred-twenty-plus region and I’m only five-nine in my stockings and just barely that.

I’m also not a model and I have no particular desire to be – it’s a hard, demanding life and one full of commands, directions, and a lack of freedom that I could never stand. I have dramatic respect for those women who do it well and come out the other end of a modeling career looking happily on their time in the industry. I just couldn’t do it, myself. I’m a photographer. And that means I could look pretty much any way I like to, although there do seem to be the “fit” photographers and the “unfit” photographers, who appear never to stand up unless they’re shooting and have an assistant bring a stool so they can move from place to place with the minimum of physical involvement.

So what’s the problem? If you haven’t noticed it yet, it’s the swing in the other direction. There’s nothing wrong with being a healthy weight. Great. We should be chanting that all the time. But just as there are problems with being underweight – and, here in the western world, this is not quite the epidemic that is often supposed, even among young women – there are myriad problems with being overweight. But that’s what’s being promoted and accepted by the proponents of this “body positive” campaign.

I shall digress here and mention that there is another positive side to the campaign, that side that encourages acceptance of those with physical disabilities. That’s great. There’s no downside to this. I encourage and support it fully, as should you.

Back to the matter at hand, you can be a healthy weight or you can be an unhealthy weight. If you are underweight, there are huge health problems that can come from it, as we have been told repeatedly by this campaign. Heart and brain problems, in particular. But we know this. It doesn’t give anyone the right to walk up to someone who is thin, though, and tell them that they’re a bad role model because they’re not heavy enough. It is a medical issue and should be taken up with a doctor, often a mental health specialist, as those who are underweight in the western world are often afflicted with an eating disorder and require specialist attention over their own body image.

Then there’s the other side. If you’re not a healthy weight, you can, as an absolutely mountainous proportion of people in this part of the world are, be overweight. And by overweight, I don’t mean you are a medically healthy weight and don’t like the fact that you have some body fat. I mean you’re obese. And the medical definition of obesity leaves far more room than many professionals would disagree with as to where it begins. Being unhealthily overweight does not come with a particular look. Someone can be heavy and have a low proportion of body fat if they are a committed gym addict – of which I know many. Women with my approximate measurements but who have forty pounds of weight on top of mine in muscle mass. I envy them their strength and I have spent a lot of my life trying to gain more of my own. I wish I could. I haven’t had much luck but I keep trying. And then there’s the sedentary lifestyle, overeating, compulsive snacking, and a culture that encourages cheat days, cheat weeks, a whole cheat life – go for the pizza, the cake, the extra helpings. This is not shaming. This is not a statement that if you are overweight that you should feel like less of a person.

This is saying that if you are overweight, it’s not something to be proud of; it is a medical problem that should be addressed as such.

I am tired of seeing fashion magazines that show girls who are brutally underweight as the goal for all women. I am, honestly, far more tired of seeing advertising, posts, shares, and the like of people who are fifty, a hundred pounds, and far more than that in many cases, overweight, parading themselves as if this is something to be proud of in the name of “body positivity.”

It’s not. And the solution isn’t to shame you into some crash diet that won’t work anyway. The solution is to normalize what is accepted as “healthy weight” into the middle from both sides. Heart failure, stroke, chronic back and neck problems, circulation issues, increased risk of many types of cancer. These are real issues and we are shoving them out of the spotlight. It’s wrong. We are encouraging young women to feel good about their bodies and that is an amazing thing. But we are going too far and telling them that they are perfect and shouldn’t change. They should. There is always room for improvement. You can always make sure you eat a healthy diet and cut out unhealthy snack foods. You can go to the gym, yoga, martial arts, whatever your exercise of choice is, on a very regular basis – much of this you can do at home, for free, if this is better for your needs or even your choices. You can encourage your friends to do the same – not by saying “You’re so fat, you need to go on a diet” or “You’re too thin, you must be anorexic” but by embracing “Let’s be more healthy.”

Friends and family play a huge part in this. So does the medical profession, which has been sadly lacking in its role, I must say.

Are you a healthy weight? Do you exercise and eat a healthy diet every day? Amazing. Now if we could all be like you and worry less about what our bodies look like and more about what we’re putting in them and doing with them, we would be a far healthier species and our healthcare system would work much, much better without all the strain of over and underweight people who are, later in their lives, suffering the after effects of not having done something about it when they were younger. Encourage your friends to come and exercise with you, help them to eat healthier and snack less – or at least snack on things that are better for their heath.

Think I’m being too critical? Because I want people to be healthier? This is not about assigning guilt or shame. But I am assigning blame. There is a huge problem in advertising and the fashion industry that is to blame for many horrendous ideals being pervasive in society. And there is the backlash of it being socially acceptable to be overweight. These are primarily to blame for what is happening in society. How do we fix this?

We fix ourselves. We go and talk to a medical professional about being a healthy weight and we talk to our friends about being supported to get there. We talk to friends who won’t shame us but who won’t tell us we’re already perfect and don’t need to do anything to take care of our health. We all need honest friends and honest doctors. More than that, we need to do something about this disaster of health before it destroys us all by collapsing a fractured medical system and tears our friends from us through disease and premature aging. Let us be there for those we love with support and not shame. Let’s truly be “body positive” and help each other to aim for bodies that are healthy and can genuinely feel positive about – not because we’re unique but because we’re proud of being healthy and helping others to be so, too.

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