There are 7 billion people on this earth. 30% of that number are morbidly obese. That’s 2.1 billion men, women, and children literally eating themselves to death.
While it seems harsh to put it that way, quite frankly, facts do not care about your feelings. I myself have been fat for most of my life, I have fat parents, fat relatives, and fat friends, but I don’t hold their “fatness” against them, I don’t believe that anybody should be shamed about their bodies. However, I don’t believe in accepting your “fatness” either. I refuse to buy into the whole “it’s okay to be fat” ruckus. It’s not. It’s not at all okay to be walking around at 500 lbs, and it's even worse to glorify such a self-destructive movement.
Since the introduction of body positivity to combat the media’s unhealthy obsession with plastering unhealthily skinny and cosmetic-abusing models on the front covers of popular fashion magazines, the movement has gone on to make way for a series of positive changes. Women in particular who don’t necessarily possess Barbie-like proportions are slowly being empowered to feel more comfortable in their skin, whilst the use of anorexic models and other forms of unrealistic beauty representations by the media have been banned in several European countries, and for good reason.
But if anorexia is viewed as an unhealthy body image for young women, then so should obesity.
Though the media has been censored from pushing the agenda of unrealistically skinny beauty representations out to the general public, that isn’t stopping them from improvising and adapting upon this little setback. It seems that the media are now taking a slightly different approach, settling to glorify the other extreme side of the spectrum, in turn, providing a large population of particularly obese women a reason to deny their biological condition in exchange for acceptance of their size and shape.
On the surface level, it may seem that fat acceptance is a step in the right direction in terms of promoting a positive body image and self-love amongst young women, but if we dig a little deeper and strip all those layers down, it uncovers a whole lot more about what the fat acceptance movement is all about. Simply put, fat acceptance is self-denial. And it’s dangerous. And it’ll only keep killing more naive people if we don’t place it under the same bracket as anorexia.
Now I’m sure that statement has split the audience, and it’s absolutely intended. But to those who still believe in the fat acceptance movement, allow me to ask you a couple of questions.
Is being obese any better than being severely underweight?
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Is fat acceptance promoting body positivity amongst obese women, or is it just a leeway for them to keep practicing the same destructive habits that will one day, inevitably kill them?
Why does fat acceptance even exist?
Actually, that last one isn’t rhetorical, I’ll take the liberty of answering that one for you, you’re welcome. The reason fat acceptance exists is that the body positivity movement has flaws. Whilst it has made several positive contributions towards the way young women in particular look at themselves and feel in their own skin, we can not fall into the trap of glorifying one side of the spectrum and shunning the other.
And that's the biggest problem I have with the media, the fact that they will pitch absolutely anything for a cash grab. The more controversial the cover the higher the exposure, the higher the exposure the higher the sales, and the higher the sales the more money they squeeze out of you. It’s an almost guaranteed never-ending cash-grabbing-money-making cycle and it’s almost impressive how well this method works for a number of media companies, until of course, we take into account how little these companies care about what exactly they are celebrating, and how much more they’d rather provide a platform for toxic movements such as fat acceptance.
A striking of example of this was back in 2018 when Cosmopolitan UK magazine elected to choose renowned plus-size model Tess Holliday as their front cover model, which of course, resulted in an outburst of controversy. While some applauded Cosmopolitan’s support for the body positivity movement, many others took to social media to criticize the company for its ignorant representation of unhealthy body image.
With all respect to Tess Holliday though, there is no doubt that she is a beautiful woman, however, this isn’t about beauty standards. This has never been about what and what isn’t considered beautiful. This is about portraying unhealthy standards of living to young naive women who consider these models on the front of magazines as a symbol of what they should like. And that’s so wrong.
Fat acceptance hides behind the name of body positivity and self-love which is why so many people blindly hop on this trend. But fat acceptance isn’t body positivity nor does it promote positive self-love at all. Like I’ve said, I know what it's like to be fat. Though I’ve never been obese, I definitely have been on the heavier side in the past, and having a glance at me now you’d have never guessed, that’s precisely the power of true self-love.
Self-love isn’t accepting your current circumstances and convincing yourself that you are happy risking your health. Self-love isn’t denying that various potential health risks can’t affect you just because you are happy. If you truly are happy, you would want to experience that for as long as possible, and if you truly loved yourself, you would embark on a journey to improve yourself, not sit around and accept defeat.
Losing weight is both easy and hard. The easy part is eating healthy, eating fewer calories than you currently burn whilst taking into account that you don’t starve yourself - you’re doing yourself no favors by “crash dieting”, or even any type of dieting to be honest. Being healthy isn’t about going on diets. Losing weight and keeping that weight off isn’t about living off green juice cleanses. The hard part about being healthy is creating new, healthy habits and replacing them with the ones that have accumulated over long periods of time. Being healthy is both a choice and a lifestyle, it requires consistency to maintain, and it's not something many people want to stick to due to abiding by the bad habits that have ingrained themselves into their brain and lifestyle, but perseverance is not a long race; it is many short races one after another. You will fail, you will want to give out and take the easy way out, but sometimes the hardest things for you to do turn out to be the best.
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