These days, it is easy to believe that if you are not extremely thin, then you are not good enough. There are thin people on television. There are thin people in the movies. Musicians are thin people. The fashion world is inundated with skinny men and women.
As such, we – people in the United States especially – have been constantly told and taught that thin is beautiful. Thin is beautiful, thin is beautiful, thin is beautiful, and if we cannot remember that, then we better write it down or get it tattooed on our foreheads so that we do not forget again.
A lot of people get up in arms about this opinion and rail about how it is what we get for letting the media tell us what to think. True enough, but when the world is full of beautiful, skinny people, it is bound to have an impact. And that argument does not work on younger people, especially girls.
There are young girls out there trying to imitate the thin female celebrities. They see these celebrities on magazines, in movies and television, plastered on billboards and advertisements, and they see no overweight people alongside these slender goddesses. They see that the fat girl is always the best friend. They see that the curvy girl never gets the guy or the prize or the happy ending.
Body weight and self acceptance are tied together irrevocably. Weight will always play a part in almost everyone’s feelings of self acceptance. It is extremely difficult to accept yourself if you see, very clearly, that who you are and what you look like do not match up to your culture’s accepted standard of beauty.
This leads people – women especially, young girls and adults – to begin losing weight using different techniques. They turn to anorexia, bulimia, and fad diets in an attempt to shrink themselves down to a socially accepted size.
Truly beautiful, is the woman who finds self acceptance through the fact that she is who she is and she is happy like that. Beautiful is the woman who does not think she has to meet any standards but her own, and beautiful is the woman who refuses to let anyone else tell her that she is not good enough, not tan enough, not blonde enough, not rich enough, not tall enough, or not skinny enough.
The majority of people – men and women – are not models. They will never be photographed for the cover of an international magazine; they will never have a part in the next big blockbuster. Knowing that, why should they subscribe to the standards of the people who do those things? Indeed, even celebrities struggle with self acceptance – after all, their flaws are illuminated for the entire world.