We should change the way we talk about weight.
The body positivity movement has helped make strides in destigmatizing fat bodies but we’ve still got a long way to go. It’s not enough to say that all bodies are beautiful, we have to start removing worth from physical appearance.
I realize that this seems impossible, because so much of what we do rides on how we look, but beauty is entirely subjective, shifting across cultures and through time. Once we fully recognize that beauty truly is in the eye of the beholder and that it has nothing to do with how we act or perform, we can start removing physicality from worth.
But how we get there is to change the way we talk about weight and beauty. In one of my classes it was mentioned that when writing we should essentially dance around the word fat, even though the story we were talking about was a woman who wants to get surgery to lose weight. It’s okay to say fat in that instance. Or, at least it should be. That’s the focus of the article, it has nothing to do with her worth. She was trying to get healthier.
Fat should not be insulting, it’s a general descriptor. We should reclaim fat so that it’s not used to attack people, because what we look like should not determine how we feel about others and ourselves.
I struggled, and still do, with my appearance since elementary school. I’ve spent hours and hours worrying about what I look like and what a detriment it’s been to me. It’s extremely important to accept all types of beauty, because it’s subjective, but I would not worry about my weight or appearance if it did not help determine what others thought about me.
It’s nice to feel beautiful and I don’t think we should be able to remove how we look entirely from societal conventions. I just don’t want young girls to constantly worry who will like them because of what they look like.
This stirs up another conversation about pushing healthy eating early and educating everyone on how to be healthy as soon as possible because it is so important to eat well. But this must be supplemental to showing our kids and our peers that their and everyone else’s value is intrinsic and does not rely upon what others say or think. And I think we need to destigmatize how we talk about weight.
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