I’ve recently came to the realization that people will complain about something but do nothing to change it. I do this all the time! Let’s begin with my weight. There’s not a month that goes by that I don’t hear something about my appearance. I always think to myself…. how lucky those skinny girls are because they can eat whatever they want and not gain weight. Yep, I’m sure you know at least one person like this. What gets me the most… is when I hear skinny people say they need to go on a diet. My face automatically drops… Like really?
My body weight has always been a struggle. I find myself going on diets and within 2-3 months I’m back to eating junk. I’ve never really understood how people say it’s a lifestyle change, like do you not enjoy eating fatty foods? It’s okay if you don’t but THIS girl does. I exercise literally 5x’s a week to just stay in shape and eat whatever my body craves. I wasn’t always like this though. In high school, I always cared about how people would perceive me. Whether I was too fat, or whether I had makeup on, or literally just the way I dressed to school every day.
I think everyone has an ideal image in their head as to the way they would like to look. I truly believe that even though someone might be content or like their appearance, there is always something someone wouldn’t mind changing about themselves. I don’t think people are ever fully content. I catch myself thinking about the things I could change in myself, if I just lost a lot of weight… But I can never get myself to make that commitment. It’s like I want it… but not bad enough.
Unruly Bodies 
I used to feel the exact same way! I think that contemporary ideas about fitness like losing weight, dieting, and thinness as the ultimate goal (sometimes at the expense of actual health) are all really, really unhealthy but really hard to unlearn and hard to get away from! If you think about WHY you complain about your body in the first place, that provides some answers. For example, do you want to lose weight because you think that losing weight will automatically make you look skinny? Do you think that being skinny is better than being fat? And from there, where did you learn that thinness is morally superior to fatness? Where did you learn that fat is (supposedly) a negative word? If you ask yourself these questions, you’ll find out pretty fast that everyone in the U.S was TAUGHT (by TV, commercials, movies, parents, etc) these false ideas about thinness, fatness, and health in general. Multiple studies have proven that it is very nearly impossible to keep weight off once you lose it. But all we see as TV watchers are shows like The Biggest Loser (which has been accused of being abusive toward its contestants by refusing to give them water and holding them in incredibly hot & small spaces), and infomercials showing before-and-after photos, telling us that life without fat is better than life with fat, all so that we’ll buy their exercise equipment or their diet pills.
That’s not to say that you shouldn’t want to change your body. We all have things we don’t like about ourselves, but it’s important that we keep in mind WHY we do the things we do. If you want to lose weight because someone made fun of you and not just FOR YOU separate of everyone else, then you can reexamine that decision. There is nothing wrong with being fat. Fat is only a negative word if you make it negative! Otherwise it’s just a descriptor like ‘tall’ or ‘short.’ But again, it’s very hard to separate the word ‘fat’ from all of its negative connotations because for our entire lives we’ve been taught that fat is bad and thin is good. We’ve constantly been exposed to TV shows and movies where fat people are the butt of the joke or the evil villain (Ursula in The Little Mermaid for example)! We’re so socialized to hate the word fat and all it leads to is people feeling ashamed of themselves. Using fat as a negative word only leads to people feeling bad, and that’s not progress. That doesn’t help anyone. Shaming people for their decisions when it comes to their own body, if they’re not hurting anyone else, doesn’t do anything to help anyone.
I also think that if we stop making assumptions about what other people eat based on how they look, we can slowly change things. A skinny girl walking down the street could have high cholesterol – you can’t see her blood, so how do you know if she eats healthy or not? And even if she does have high cholesterol, it’s none of our business! Her body doesn’t have any effect on our life on a day-to-day basis. So if a fat girl walks down the street, it is absolutely no one’s place to say anything unsolicited about her health or her appearance for that matter. A random stranger’s health status is none of our business, so why do we seem to care so much?