Tuesday, April 4, 2023

Being a teenager in the era of the "body positivity" movement is the worst thing ever

Edit: Thank you for the gold!

I (16F) used to be overweight. I had hypothyroidism and an emotional eating issue that led to my rapid weight gain. My entire life I had always been a little bit chubby, but most of it was baby fat and I was still considered to be of a healthy weight. It never really hit me how big I was until I developed an eating disorder. It started with models who talked about eating a shit ton of pizza and junk and yet they were still skinny, meanwhile it felt like I breathed next to a pizza and gained weight, even though I would usually just eat an entire large pizza BY MYSELF, meanwhile now I eat 2 slices of a small and I'm knocked out, but obviously in my little brain I didn't comprehend that the amount of food I was eating was FAR too much and that simply reducing my portions would've made me lose a lot of weight. So I fell into the cycle of unhealthily restricting calories. That was during the time when Victoria's Secret models were still a thing and were still idolized.

Then 2016 came around and "body positivity" was the new thing. All these obese and "plus size" models talking about how you can be happy in your own body no matter your weight or no matter how your body looks. Sounds good right? WRONG. Nobody ever mentioned how body positivity was created for those with "deformities" or disabilities that affected how they looked that they COULDN'T CONTROL, so people with missing limbs for example. Now I got sucked into this whole movement and shifted from my pr* an* forums to "body positivity" forums and "big is beautiful" forums, where random adults would tell me that teenagers are stupid and that I shouldn't worry about my weight because when I'm an adult I'll realize "men like bigger women" or some other nonsense. Now obviously I believed it, and I believed it for a while. I believed that birth control could make you the size of a hot air balloon or that my hypothyroidism was going to make me fat anyways so why even bother. That lasted until I noticed none of the "plus sized" models that were supposedly similar to me, actually looked like me. Most of them, even at their larger sizes still had perfectly shaped figures and slim faces, like Ashley Graham or Iskra Lawrence, and I realized I actually didn't love myself, I was just lying to myself to hide the fact that I was unhappy.

There's nothing fun in not being able to find your size in stores, or not wanting to participate in sports because you're afraid you'll look like a flailing whale, there's nothing fun in barely being able to climb a flight of stairs without wheezing or having a large hawaiian pizza be the highlight of your week. I realized that I was unhappy and my health was deteriorating.

I started watching YouTubers like Natacha Oceane or Coffee (a Chinese YouTuber) who I learned a lot from and taught me how to take better care of my health and be more in tune with my body, and I managed to lose over 30lbs and am now at a healthy weight, and with that weight loss I was able to completely reverse my hypothyroidism and my thyroid is now at a healthy size. Even just thinking about my habits and the things I believed back then and just how easy it is for teenagers like me to be influenced by these people makes me angry. Sure you may not be insecure about your big thighs or bony elbows, but you don't "love your body", you hate your organs and bones that have to work extra hard to simply function, or your failing organs that can barely function to the point where you feel dizzy even when sitting down or your bones crack with almost every movement and THAT is your body.

Sure, some people are born "naturally skinny" or "big boned", but that doesn't make you extremely underweight or overweight/obese and there are even different healthy weights based on bones structure which is how I'm weighed at my hospital. And sure you might have a health issue that makes you underweight or overweight, but people with those health issues don't just accept their deteriorating health and start telling people it's okay to neglect your body because of that. I wish more people my age or even just in general understood that being on or being close to the extreme end of those spectrums is not healthy, and that physical and mental health are ALWAYS the priority above physical appearance.

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