Body-shaming

“You’ve become so fat”, “you should think about loosing some weight”, “hey! go and eat something, you need it”, “look how ugly she is”, “atleast you don’t look like him” “Haha, look at him, he looks like a girl”. All of these comments seemed so familiar to you, didn’t they? Everyone has been on both sides of the picture, saying it or being the one to whom it is said. Now, the moment of truth. A person’s body fat, appearance, physical features, complextion, abnormalities has nothing to do with his/her personality, nature, intelligence or mind set.

Body shaming is “the action or practice of humiliating someone by making mocking or critical comments about their body shape or size” this was just a bookish explaination of the word but it affects a person on a very deep level. It leaves a person questioning his/her existence and as time passes by that person starts to hate his/her body, start getting a lot more concious about it and ends up enhancing or forcing himself to change the physical features rather than increasing knowledge or working on the relevent things like personality and confidence.

Body-shaming is mostly done unknowingly and just for humour but when a person is repeatedly mocked because of his/her appearance, body shape or size, and turns into a type of depression namely, body dysmorphic disorder or BDD in which people start thinking about their real or perceived flaws for hours each day. They start having eating disorders which finally turn into deadly diseases. 

You just saw what just your “harmless” joke can turn into. I too used to believe that such mockings and jokes can’t really be so harmful that it can totally change a person’s attitude towards life. 

The irony is, sometimes just some “harmless” words or jokes can degrade a person’s confidence level but when the time comes, he/she uses the same as a go-to defence in such situations. A person becomes so habitual of such phrases that they start believing in it and starts blaming themselves for being that way.

A person’s physical appearance is never in his hands. He cannot change the way he looks, or the skin complextion, but, along with the development of technology and science, there is a huge increase in production of such commodities which are said to remove or basically hide the abnormalities, as they are said to have, and such products are earning a huge profit too because people are starting to believe that they are not normal. 

If they have a fat body it is being termed as an abornormality, or having a dark complextion is not acceptable in a society, or having a bony body is the sign of malnourishment. No. A big no. Every person is perfect. The only thing that matters is their thought process, their nature, personality, the way they approach another person. Body structure will eventually change with their age, if you want to fall in love, fall in love with their soul, fall in love the way they talk, fall in love with the person not their physical appearance.