It’s difficult to put ourselves in someone else’s shoes when our experience is not like theirs. But it’s even easier to judge every-body generalizing that our experience can apply to everyone indistinctly.
If we talk about experiences that concern food and body, what we live is a totally personal experience. In fact, Not only our bodies look different, but they work differently and respond to food and movement differently.
Why we continue to judge every-body
How many times, looking someone fatter of thinner than us, have we commented that they would have been much healthier or more attractive if they had eaten more or if they had followed a diet?
Body shaming come easy because these are based on the experiences on our bodies. The fact, for example, that we have lost weight or managed to lose weight without particular diets or without having worked hard in the gym doesn’t mean that everyone can do it. And even if all this lead to a better health, this doesn’t mean that everyone can achieve the same result doing the exact same things.
Our experience is not universal. No one can have an idea of the health or habits of someone just by looking, not even a doctor. And no one has the right to expect or ask others to change their bodies.
Body shaming and insults
All make mistakes in life. And at some point in our life we all said or did something that made someone shame or hurt because of his body. It happened to you as it happened to me too. Maybe it wasn’t something intentional or we didn’t think about it too much. We saw a person who was too fat or too thin for us and we thought it was helpful to say to eat a little more or less, to comment his/her habits and other things like those
That’s why the body shaming entered in a logic where we believed that people deserve to receive this behaviors because of the body they have. We thought that was the price they have to pay for “letting theirselves go”
Maybe he/she was a dearer friend of ours, thinner or fatter than us, who told us he/she was insulted. And we replied that “you can’t change the world and that the only thing to do is change your body”. But we didn’t think that, by saying so, we made him/her feel even more abandoned and isolated for how he/she felt
Maybe we had some weird faces when we were next to a person with a different body than ours. Maybe we said “but how does she stay with someone like him?” or “what courage to go around like that”?! And we didn’t think about how these things could make that person feel.
It happened to everyone. But the only way to do better is to do things differently.
