BODYSHAMING: A JOKE FOR U,A CURSE FOR US

Did you ever stop and think about how often we are told to change our appearance?  Magazines constantly offer tips about how to lose weight “in days,” appear slimmer “instantly,” and hide our “imperfections”… without actually knowing anything about us, much less our appearance.  This is one example of body-shaming, and it is everywhere.  Sitcoms so frequently use overweight characters’ bodies as the basis of many of the show’s jokes.  It has become the norm to criticize aspects of our bodies as some type of bonding experience with friends – if we all hate our bodies; it somehow makes us feel connected and united.  Body-shaming (criticizing yourself or others because of some aspect of physical appearance) can lead to a vicious cycle of judgment and criticism.  Messages from the media and from each other often imply that we should want to change, that we should care about looking slimmer, smaller, and tanner.  And if we don’t, we worry that we are at risk of being the target of someone else’s body-shaming comments.

A true case story: THE STORY AS NARRATED BY PRATHA PARIHAR

I had always been confident about my myself and my body.
 I never used to get comments based  on my body when I was young,but when I came to middle school things changed, some of my classmates started bodyshaming me due to my appearance and naively started to call me 'fatty' but this didn't impact me at the time ,(i was surely positive about my body ). But their abuse aggravated  by the time i reached  8th grade.
Slowly but surely these comments started affecting me ,due to which i started being self conscious. The problem further deepened for me  when  members of my own family  started to  body shame me .
 These events caused me to bug me over time,it is one thing being teased by my  fellow student ,but a totally different story when my own family joined them.This changed the way I looked at myself  and the sad part is i actually started to believe all of it because now the people close to me started teasing me  and commenting on my body. 
i couldn't do anything about this at the time, I acted as if I didn't care but inside I really doubted everything about myself ,i lost who i perceived my self to be because of what others said about me.

 I started to crying myself to sleep every night ,I was tormented , felt like everyone were judging me.
My real breaking point came when i tried talking to my mother and discussing the issue with her but sadly she didn't pay much attention, she just said that it was all in my head. (but i knew it wasn't just in my head ,i could hear every single name they had for me in the back of my  mind)
I was body-positive for sooo many years and some how they found a way to break me Sometimes I would get this thought that maybe I should just disappear and everything will be alright. I started to eat less and less  food( perceiving  food  as something  evil)but I wasn't able to gain back the confidence I had.It is almost sinister how peoples dumb opinion affects us mentally early on.

 I am still obsessively conscious about myself. It was  actually difficult to me to share this story of mine , because no one  knows that this is happening to me ,not even people who think have figured me out.  I thought maybe sharing this will let people know that you need to love yourself no matter what like what i am trying to do ,without bothering about what people have to say about us.



This very story that Pratha shared with us(A brave act indeed ) shows how people who have smaller mindset instead of promoting a body positive image in this society of different looking individuals can affect people who them self are body positive due to their typical behavior  of mocking or teasing people.The sad part is they do so even due to their peers or as a compensation for accommodating their sad life.It becomes even more stupider when such bodyshamers do such things only to grab attention of individuals of similar mind set, the don't  even have concision's    to think that this might happen to them to .Almost all of us out there have consciously or unconsciously body shamed (myself included) .We are all to be blamed for such actions , some of us are too naive to understand how others are affected by this, what adverse effect it has on people ( until we go through it by ourselves) . But we need to realize that its not late even now , we all can change. It's what we do to compensate for this shameful act that matters.



so, we ask u this ,please just take an initiative to ask forgiveness from the people that u have shamed.
You may not realize this, but this one move of your's will be a precious and much needed gesture to them( believe me, it is huge for us)

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