We live in a world where our physical appearance is constantly being evaluated, whether we ask for it or not. Thinness is often celebrated as a sign of discipline and self control, while fatness is associated with laziness and unhealthy habits. But when did the way someone’s body looks become an indication of their worth?

The movie poster for Super Size Me reflects this same attitude toward bodies. The poster features a man with his mouth stuffed with French fries, creating an exaggerated image of excessive eating. Although the documentary focuses on the consequences of eating fast food, its messaging also contributes to a larger conversation about how we associate weight with health and personal responsibility. In American society, gaining weight is often portrayed as a consequence of poor decisions, while losing weight is celebrated as an accomplishment. But this way of thinking ignores how complicated our relationships with food, exercise, and our bodies actually are.

It reminds me of my experience running track, where being slim and athletic made me appear healthy, even when I was pushing my body to the point of vomiting. Meanwhile, someone in a larger body could be exercising regularly and still be judged as unhealthy. Both examples reveal how quickly we make assumptions about people’s habits and well-being based on appearance alone. What bothers me is that these judgments are often disguised as concern for someone’s health, when they may actually reflect society’s discomfort with bodies that do not fit a particular ideal.

TW: Discussion of Eating Disorders

I have struggled with body image for most of my life. I can vividly remember the negative comments my mom would say about her body when I was about 5 years old, such as “I have too much flab here”, “This is sagging”, “Look at my C-section scar, so huge”, and “I am so huge”. I can’t think of a time when the topic of appearance came up, and she wouldn’t call herself fat. And when my mom called herself fat, she was really calling herself disgusting and undeserving of love.

A lot of these conversations would lead to my mom saying, “God, I wish I had your body”. “Enjoy it while you can”, like her scars and flab were the cost for me, and I must be skinny to make all of this change worth it. “It’s fleeting!” The societal definition of my happiness is fleeting, and she was trying to live vicariously through my skinniest. I was maybe 10 years old. This is the age when my mom stopped packing my lunches, and I pretended to pack my own. This was the beginning of my eating disorder. 

“What is your preferred pharmacy?” These can be really relieving words or very stressful ones. Is this a solution to your problems, or just a way to cope and live life a little easier? Or is it an incomplete answer for your needs?

I’ve noticed that many people find doctor’s appointments complicated. Some feel shame about telling the truth. The doctor could be from the same ethnic background as you, so you don’t want to tell them that you smoke. Or you could be in a busy clinic that accepts Medicaid and is pushing you out, like the pills they prescribe you. Why is it so hard to find a physician who can see you for you?

Women and racial/ethnic minorities are 20% to 30% more likely to be medically misdiagnosed than white men, according to the lead author of a 2023 BMJ Quality & Safety study, as reported by KFF Health News: https://kffhealthnews.org/race-and-health/medical-misdiagnosis-women-minorities-health-care-bias/

My point is that medicine is often treated as the whole answer when it should be only one part of it. I don’t want a band-aid. I want a plan.

Roxane Gay, a Black author, writes about this in two essays about her body and her weight-loss surgery: “What Fullness Is” and “My Body Is a Cage of My Own Making.” She describes not being seen as a person but as a fat person, someone severely overweight, someone who looks like she needs fixing. She is not being looked at as just Roxane Gay, who is genuinely trying to figure out what can make her healthy. I’d add that healthy doesn’t have to be synonymous with losing weight. She describes doctors “always trying to ‘treat’ my weight before anything else.” Doctors told her she wouldn’t live to 40, then 50, and her family pushed her toward surgery.

After surgery, she describes being cold and exhausted from eating only 1,200–1,500 calories. She writes, “I am filled with regrets because everything has changed, but everything is exactly the same.” In “What Fullness Is,” she says, “I am empty, but I know what fullness is.” To me, that doesn’t sound like the definition of healthy. Healthy means being cared for as a whole person, not only as a body to fix. Her next step wasn’t another procedure. She goes back to therapy to deal with what the surgery didn’t fix.

In “My Body Is a Cage of My Own Making,” she compares weight to skin color, because it is something you cannot hide, and no one can see you apart from the body you are in. Separately, my own view is that being healthy is about what’s underneath, not what’s outside. She also says she built the cage herself, which complicates blaming doctors alone, since she partly blames herself, and that self-blame is part of the harm. Doctors who look at the body first and the person second are part of how bias happens. As a Black woman, Gay falls into both groups the stats above cover, and what she describes is the same kind of bias.

So am I really trying to hear, “What is your preferred pharmacy?” No. I’m trying to hear a solution. For me, the solution is someone who listens, explains the plan, and treats me as a person.

The way a lot of people see me versus how I see myself is very fractured. On the outside, you may see a woman, feminine features, a ‘small’ frame. On the inside, you’ll see a pile of flesh, literally. That’s all I see myself as, a pile of flesh with a pink bow on top to signal to outsiders that I am feminine. But what does it mean if I still see myself as a feminine thing but not a woman?

I still like to participate in things that are aesthetically feminine, I still love the color pink, I still love painting my nails and doing my hair, and trying out makeup. But I want absolutely nothing to do with tasks that are seen as traditionally ‘woman’, I DO NOT want to have to depend on someone else, I DO NOT want to be nurturing and selfless all the time, and I DO NOT want to care for kids, I don’t even like the thought of my body going through a menstrual cycle. I know that not every woman does these things that I just listed off, but many people assume that to be a woman, you have to have a desire to do at least one of them. Most would argue that these feelings aren’t that big of an issue; after all, I do have a choice of whether or not I can do those things. But it’s the fact that people’s outside perceptions will never match how I feel on the inside. Roxane Gay talks about how a lot of people project assumed narratives onto your body without being interested in the truth; while she was referencing how people treat you when you are overweight, this is true for every visible identity. No one will ever look at me and assume that I’m just a person who happens to be feminine; they will always see me embody femininity on the outside and expect me to fulfil the role of a ‘woman’. What makes it worse is that I’ll never be able to explain away that woman label; it doesn’t matter if I try and act selfish, it doesn’t matter if I look like the Babadook if it was supposed to represent processed sugars instead of grief. If i dont look like a man, then I must be a woman.

From one to ten, how would you rate my looks? I’ve been asked this by so many friends of mine and even asked it myself. Subconsciously wanting to rate my looks on a scale made by society’s world of what “beautiful” is. I haven’t always struggled with my self image as much as I do now. I used to be pretty alright with how I look and I used to not care about how I look at myself. But, that didn’t last very long.

One day at school, I saw a few boys talking. Usually I would ignore them and go play by myself, but I knew these guys, they were my friends! I wanted to talk to them. When I walked over, they were talking about some of the girls in our class, who they thought were the prettiest. I didn’t really understand why but I wanted to know how they thought about me, as a girl.

They said “But yea, you aren’t like a girl girl. You wear shorts and pants! You’re basically one of us. You aren’t really on the pretty scale.”

For some reason it made me happy but also why? I felt a flash of annoyance and inferiority. I stopped talking to them after and I started to look at myself more. I wore a lot of black, I wore a lot of T-shirts, I wore a lot of things unbecoming of a young girl. That was the first time I felt self-conscious of how I looked to everyone. I wondered if everyone saw me like that. As just “a lesser guy” because I wasn’t exactly a guy but I didn’t really look like a girl. 

“She was letting me know that however long I lasted, she would last longer. She would not be bested by a fat ass.” – Roxane Gay

So many girls are pitted against each other, to see who is the prettiest, who is the skinniest and who is just better than each other. They have to present themselves in a certain way to even be considered a girl but it’s also a competition to see who is the most pretty, the most beautiful, the most skinny. To girls who don’t fit into any of those categories, they aren’t seen as girls at all. You feel inferior to other girls, which builds resentment to them, to everyone. A constant unseen competition between women.

Growing up in P.G. County, Maryland, black is all I knew. My teachers were black, my doctors were black, and the cops were black. I’ve met people with hundreds of years of ancestry here, from Haiti, Ghana, Brazil, different shades, personalities, sizes, the whole nine yards. I have a broad perspective of black people, and my eyes are truly opened to how many stories reside in the black diaspora. However, I find that if you ask many black immigrants in America about African Americans, you will hear one single story: criminals, gangsters, scammers. People who are dangerous and uneducated. Even on the other side of the coin, many will say similar things about Africans: ugly, cheap, uneducated, and can barely speak English. Each culture has its stories, and despite being so similar, the black diaspora finds itself so split from one another. 

The stories seen online and perpetuated by the media have taken such a heavy toll on my community that groups that could look like siblings find themselves constantly at odds with one another. I remember one day I had gotten twists for the very first time; when I came home, my house was on fire. My parents looked at me with solemn disappointment and shame. The reitered over and over that I looked like “all those criminals out there”, and I wouldn’t get hired looking like this. The same hairstyles unique to us, that our own ancestors created and practiced for generations, were being watered down to a criminal identity. What a shame. The same story of violence and ineptitude that has long been used to describe black people is the same story ingrained in my immigrant parents. Despite living in P.G. County for years, despite the great African American people they may interact with so often, that same single story still prevails. What a shame. 

I find Chimamanda’s “The Danger of a Single Story” very relatable, because the perceptions that come from only believing a single story have ravaged my community, and I wonder whether or not one day we will open our eyes to read another.