I've just watched a rather disturbing video called "Dear Fat People" by a youtuber called Nicole Arbour. Now, I'm all for comedy. I love comedy. But what I just watched wasn't remotely funny. What it was, was a platform for this particular youtuber to shame people for a body type that she doesn't seem to be able to relate to. I don't know anything about this woman - I've literally just discovered her channel this evening - but first impressions were terrible if I'm honest.
I don't want to make this post a huge rant about how wrong she is and how toxic her words are, even though those two things are entirely true. What I want to do is talk about how we need to stop being negative about our own bodies and about other people's bodies. There is no perfect body type and there is nothing that we should all be aspiring to look like, despite the fact that the media tells us day in and day out what we should and shouldn't be doing. Tall, short, slim, curvy, pear-shaped - every single body type that can be named is just as perfect as the last.
It can be crippling when someone makes a negative comment about your appearance or your weight, and I think that a large majority of people nowadays seem to forget that behind the tweets or the facebook profile pictures or the instagram posts are actual human beings. It's so easy to stomp on your keyboard and type out some cleverly, or usually, a badly worded insult and press send, but you so easily forget that there is a real live person that you have sent those words to. Some people who choose to vent their feelings about other people's weight claim to be trying to help - a way of kick starting someone into losing or gaining weight. I don't know about you, but whenever I have been faced with hurtful comments about the way I look, it's effectively crushed all motivation that I had left to do something about it. It does a damn sight more harm than good, and can drive people to awful extremes.
Instead of throwing critical comments in someone's direction, why not stop and think of something kind to say instead? You could literally brighten someone's day by saying something nice about them, and personally I much prefer the feeling of being kind to someone than being horrible.
What I'm trying to say, in a nutshell, is that everyone has their own insecurities. Everyone has something that they would change about themselves if they could. It's a horrible truth, but it's a truth nontheless. We need to stop playing on those insecurities to "make a point" or, even worse, to "make a joke" and instead focus on telling people everything that is wonderful about them.
Stop body shaming and start being body positive.
Peace out.
~ C xxx
P.S. Check out this video by Carrie Hope Fletcher about the subject of body shaming. She talks about some of the things I've mentioned in this post.
