According to Dr. Ann Kearney-Cooke, a Cincinnati psychologist specializing in body image – women experience an average of 13 negative body image thoughts each day. That’s one negative thought every waking hour. Her study also revealed that 97% of respondents reported having severe negative thoughts about their bodies over the course of a full day.
The booming diet industry, now worth $72billion in the United States alone, undoubtedly contributes to our growing appearance culture. Because of this, body shaming and appearance microaggressions are incidences that happen to everyone on a daily basis.
While incidences of body shaming can be subtle and unintentional, they play a large effect on any recipient. This may even lead to a ripple effect of appearance discrimination in our workplace, friend circles, and families.
Three Forms of Implicit Body Shaming
1. Self-Shaming
We all have days when we aren’t happy with how we look, when we’ve eaten until we’re uncomfortably full, or when we’ve missed a few days of exercise. But consistently identifying yourself as ‘fat’ communicates that you perceive being or having fat as an insult. It also reinforces within yourself and those around you, an unhealthy and false correlation between feeling full or resting and gaining “sinful” amounts of weight.
2. Third-Party Shaming
Third-party shaming means judging one’s appearance in their absence. This includes judging the body of a celebrity, athlete, a long lost cousin, or an absent colleague. While seemingly harmless, you may implicitly transmit the shaming and prejudicial message to those listening to you. Back in my days as a gymnast, I’ve often overheard coaches and parents picking on another gymnast’s physique. Although some comments weren’t directed to me per se, it still impacted my expectations to starve myself small.
3. Giving unsolicited diet and exercise advice
Whether it stems from good intentions or a joking manner, commenting on someone’s lifestyle choices continues to stamp a moral value on them based on how they’re eating and exercising. We never really know someone’s relationship with food and exercise. Hence, policing and concern trolling someone’s lifestyle can cause a lot of shame for those struggling with body image, disordered eating, and/or exercise issues.
Concluding thoughts…
Living in a society with impossible beauty ideals and insidious diet industry, being subjected to body scrutiny and judgment is inevitable. Many of us have experienced inadvertent shaming even by those closest to us, or we may have accidentally shamed others unconsciously too.
The truth is that bodies come in all shapes and sizes. Just like every evolving being in nature, we all deserve to be valued despite appearance and health. No one’s body is less worthy of support and respect just because they don’t fit inside a societal construct of beauty. So, before making an appearance-related comment, let’s all take a beat at what we say and how we say it.
