Lexia_Starr
Blitzkrieg Beauty
Lexia_Starr
Blitzkrieg Beauty
That whole "fat talk" thing is bullshit. If you're unhealthy and you know it, you should feel guilty about eating unhealthy foods or dieting too much.
That whole idea says that it's okay to do whatever makes you happy, regardless of how it's affecting your health, and saying that it's wrong to feel guilt. If you let your body get to a place where you don't think it's attractive, you're allowed to feel guilty because it's your fault--that's what guilt is.
I do think the movement itself has good intentions, but having personal preferences about the way you and the people around you look isn't a bad thing. Making fun of people or being unhappy with your body to the point of making yourself unhappy is bad, though.
We don't need to tell everyone that they are beautiful just the way they are, we need to promote healthiness and make healthiness the ideal. It's unrealistic to say that one body type is the only beautiful body type, and it's detrimental to keep up the "skinny is beautiful" and the "real women have curves" comments.
I disagree because to me, that discriminates against people who are predisposed to or contract health conditions that they have little to now control over. And I do think that obsessing over food is unhealthy overall. That includes emotional eating and obsessive dieting and food guilt. Yes, you shouldn't eat four hamburgers in one sitting, but if you're 200lb, you shouldn't feel worthless for eating a hamburger at all. The fact of the matter is, that once a person looses their self-loathing and guilt, they have a much higher proclivity towards actually adapting healthier habits. It's like when a taboo swings back and finds a happy medium. And even addiction tends to stem from self-loathing, so even that can be at least given a pathway to begin to heal.
Eliminating the guilt can also eliminate the want to not do those unhealthy things.
Food guilt can lead to people making healthier choices. Like, if you know you're unhealthy, eat a greasy hamburger for lunch, feel guilty about it and decide to go for a long walk to burn those calories, or next time to choose a lower calorie sandwich or salad. That's when guilt can be a good thing.
And excess of guilt, or feeling guilty for things you shouldn't feel guilty for is bad, but telling people not to ever feel bad about what they eat is promoting unhealthy eating habits. If someone does eat 4 hamburgers for lunch, they should feel guilty about that. You can't tell that person that it's okay, they shouldn't feel bad, and they should think they're beautiful anyway. Tell people that they shouldn't feel guilty for small things or for things that are out of their control, but they should feel guilty for some things.
Like I said, we should be pushing health instead of an ideal body image. I just think the way to get people to stop being so obsessed with their weight and their body images and direct their attention to being as healthy as they realistically can. Instead of "thin is in" or "real women have curves" we should be saying "healthy is beautiful" and teaching people about how they can realistically be healthy.
I disagree. I don't think guilt is the right path to take and I honestly don't believe guilt has any positive effects. I think ti should be about education and fact-based decision-making, not furthering poor emotional relationships between people and food. If food as too many positive triggers, like food rewards, then people go to food for comfort and overeat. If people have too many negative food triggers, such as guilt, when they are feeling down then they use it as a form of self-abuse and overeat.
I still think guilt can be a good thing, like in the example I used.
If feeling guilty causes you to better yourself, it's a good thing. If someone is told to never feel guilty about any of their eating habits, they won't see any reason to change them for the better. Like, if someone ate 4 hamburgers for one meal, they shouldn't feel good about that, and they shouldn't be told to feel good about it. They shouldn't be told it's okay to do that because they're beautiful the way they are. It's a nice gesture to say that you shouldn't feel guilty for what you eat but realistically sometimes you should. You shouldn't feel guilty about occasional treats for yourself, even a few times a week it's okay to pleasure eat, but when your entire diet becomes one big treat, you have a problem and it should be treated as a problem.
I agree that education is the way to go about fixing the whole body image thing, though.
The whole "Operation Beautiful" thing has good intentions, but I don't think the way it's going about achieving the goal of making people feel better about themselves is actually going to do anything. We can't tell people that everyone is beautiful, we can't tell people that their unhealthy habits are okay in fear of making them feel guilty, and we can't tell people that feeling guilty for doing something they know isn't a good thing is a wrong feeling.
Some people deal with guilt in unhealthy ways, but that doesn't mean that guilt itself is a bad thing all the time, it just means that they have bad coping skills.
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