Thin is in but big is beautiful


Thin is in. The message is ubiquitous and being made pervasive by every channel catering to all human senses – media, society and fashion rule-crafters. The quantum of pressure this puts on individuals of all shapes, sizes, colors and age group is phenomenal and incessantly prospering.

World is flushed with creative diet plans and professionals professing to help you fit into the size of your aspiration, medicated pills claming to help you shed those extra pounds sans effort and slimming centers catering to your baser need of that cellulite loss which would help you look like the ‘after’ in their before and after ads.

Obesity (with apology to professional nitpickers who split the hair between being obese and overweight, I would take the liberty of clubbing them into one) is touted to be an albatross around your neck which somehow makes you inferior to others. Fat are the protagonists in sit coms, have special stores to shop for and are instinctively assumed to be lazy and dim-witted.

But having been there and waging a constant war from a fallback to that taboo range on the weighing scale, I can safely proclaim that the dissatisfaction with one’s physical shape is a phenomenon that has negligible relatedness to one’s actual physical status. Irrespective of how thin or fat one is there is a reflex wish to be thinner. Unfortunately there is no stopping.

For some extreme cases, this addiction to loose weight takes the ugly form of eating disorders. The disorders like anorexia or binging can easily be compared to any psychological disorder with graver consequences as it has a direct and instant effect on one’s body. Advanced cases of anorexia have been found to indulge in purging for double digit times a day. Sadly, this also has no association with the true physical form.

The association lies in our mental image of how we look, which through many social experiments have been found to be poles apart from how the world perceives us. We are the worst critics of ourselves. The belief that the world fits us into the category of obesity constantly hammers down our self-esteem which is reflected in our interactions and attitude.

The lack of appreciation from friends and especially family further pulls down the already low esteem. Criticism on looks by close-ones adds to the mental conditioning that one is unattractive and it somehow is a non-reversible curse.

Fall-outs of the low self worth associated with a perceived lack of physical attractiveness are myriad and very commonly observed. Being overtly aggressive, clinging on to anyone who expresses even an iota of appreciation, criticizing all aspects, especially those concerning intellectual capabilities, of those who by social mores are attractive, are some of the easily observable ones.

Like everything else the choice lies in our hands. One can either choose to feel like a victim of fate, adopting an ostrich solution to the ‘problem’ by burying our face in the ground hoping for the storm to pass on it’s own or can choose to gear up and decide to expense all our might into reaching the evasive goal we have set for ourselves. More important than an honest effort to feel healthy and beautiful, we owe it to ourselves to love the way our body is at the moment, which when sent out as an implicit message is reciprocated by the world. We also owe it to others to refrain from judgments, criticisms and discussions about other’s physical appearance. Like author Jessica Weiner of the book “Do I look Fat?” very succinctly puts, someone else’s body is none of our business.

It’s another chicken and egg situation, whether we feel good when we look good or we look good when we feel good. Irrespective of the direction of the solution, the attempt must be a continual improvement of our mental and physical capacities. It certainly is worth it.