The shame many people experience about weight and body is a crushing burden. They live their lives with the unwavering belief that their body is unhealthy, unattractive and unlovable. They interact with others always feeling less valuable. These thoughts plague them every minute of every day.
In most posts in this blog, I write about body shame with respect to people with eating disorders. That feeling is central to the hold eating disorders have on a person’s life.
The shame people with eating disorders feel is often shared by others. Women and men, young and old, people of all different sizes experience enormous shame about themselves embodied by their physical being.
Recent posts highlight the fine line between an eating disorder and a body lauded by society. The external validation or vilification doesn’t always affect the internal experience people have about their body. Shame often exists no matter how the world reacts to one’s body.
To be clear, I don’t mean to compare the extreme hatred people with eating disorders can feel about their body with the more common pervasive shame. However, discussing widespread shame makes it easier to explain how common self-hatred is.
Our physical selves represent what we show to the world. Without knowledge of the other person, people can assess, judge, criticize or praise anyone’s body.
Our culture now and for many decades values thinness over almost anything. Thinness represents success and diligence, willpower and determination, financial means and the luxury of time and attention to oneself. Thinness is not the number on the scale or solely a measure of vanity. Thinness represents a moral high ground that can be the means to feel superior to others.
Anyone who perceives their body or their lives to be less than ideal can immerse their sense of failure and loss into body shame. Peers, media of all kinds, family and even doctors reinforce the idealization of thinness. Medications beckon people to inject themselves with the hope of an ideal body. Body shame is an accepted way of being in the world.
The purpose of a social construct built around shame is to keep people in line. Those in charge, supported by success and financial backing, can keep a stronger hold by propagating shame as a way to make money and exploit negative feelings about oneself for personal or corporate gain. Personal well-being does not satisfy the greed of various industries which use our collective self-reproach to induce us to spend money hoping to find a reprieve from the shame.
It’s hard to know where education can make inroads into all of our shame. Medicine has little evidence to support the connection between larger bodies and poor health. In fact, there’s more evidence that smaller bodies lead to more health issues with age. Small changes for body positivity pale in comparison with overvaluing thinness. Food, fashion, diet and exercise industries all benefit enormously from our desire to feel better by losing weight. And the newest availability of weight loss drugs adds a new wrinkle to the desire for thinness.
Perhaps the goal is to find value in ourselves in new ways. We can’t win the thinness argument, but we can agree that love, compassion, kindness and care lead to more happiness than focusing on weight and body. We can look for new ways to find joy in a world bent on profiting from our misery.
People who recover from an eating disorder go on an existential journey to find themselves and meaning in their lives. Creating new ways to cope with emotions and with life’s travails forces anyone in recovery to take a hard look at what matters. People who venture down this path often end up better equipped to handle the cultural shame so many of us endure. Escape from shame entails finding a new and different way to live, one that values things that truly matter in life.
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