The Insecurities Underlying Our Love Handles

The Hindu Festival of Lights—Diwali—is just round the corner. And with Diwali come gifts, gatherings and of course, FOOD! From delicious ghee laden laddoos to deep-fried, savory namkeen; one will surely find themselves hogging on all the possible extra but yummy calories in their daily menus during this festive week. This ditto scenario is witnessed be it Diwali, Christmas, Eid, or any other festival.

Quick questions:

1. How many of you would hesitate before giving in to the urging demands of your sweet tooth?
2. How many of you would feel guilty & reprimand yourself after the festivities are over for having lost control over your diet?
3. How many of you wouldn’t even touch the fatty foods for the fear of turning into a fatty you?

My guess: Most of us, to varying degrees of course.

The ideal body type

The “ideal body type” is often a perfect hourglass figure for females and V shaped torso for males. This ideal, however, goes much beyond the idea of “fat is bad” to entail the requirements of fuller lips

and Kardashian hips for females and facial hair that can be flaunted during No-Shave-November for males. It demands fair, waxed-of-all-bodily-hair skin for females and tall, muscular, biceps-endowed frame for males. The list can go on. But two important notes to be made here:

First, the lists are heavily differentiated for the two sexes and any crossover between the two is more or less frowned upon (E.g. a “too tall” female can expect herself to be fired with a slew of mean comments).

Second, the list is so specific in its requirements that it fails to capture the uniqueness of all individuals. Consequently, it labels anyone who doesn’t fit in, as either fat or any other form of ugly. Ipso facto, my waist line of 30 is as imperfect (although a little less unacceptable) as someone else’s waist line of 36. Nevertheless, all of us are lesser creatures in front of that woman who is bestowed with the perfectly tiny waist of 24 inches.

How did this “hunger for the ideal body” manage to creep into our psyche?

The perfectness quotient enshrined by this ideal that as often showcased and praised in media is next to impossible yet aspirational. “Someone on the big screen was able to achieve it. So why can’t I?”—this is the logic that is often invoked by our minds when acceptance for what we are is already available scarcely in the society that we live in.

Most of the movies we watch portray stereotypically fat characters as having a stereotypically tragic story—one of low self confidence, gullibility and failure in matters of school, love and career (E.g. Think of Sweetu aka Delnaaz from Kal Ho Na Ho). In real life too, the “fat guys and gals” are reduced to nothing but a point of joke, criticism and rejection—no one wants to date or befriend a “fatty”, the “sit-on-you-and-kill-you” joke is a classic and a million other ways have been discovered to label them not good enough.

Time to rethink if this is really funny

It might be “just a joke” to you. Others along with your “fat or dark skinned friend” may even laugh with you, irrespective of really being comfortable with it. But a deeper consequence results at a psychological level when body shaming becomes a part of our everyday conversation. In psychology, reinforcer is a term used to denote positive and negative environmental responses that strengthen a particular behavior. Thus, unquestioned transmission of body shaming in everyday communication reinforces us to laugh at the next “fatty/ blackie” we see, reducing that person to nothing— embodying no talents or positives—beyond their undesirable body type.

 

Barbie (Left) v/s Emme Doll (Right)

Next, the availability of innumerable cosmetic surgery    procedures and beauty products essentially perpetuate the    idea that we are NOT OKAY the way we are and that there is always “something better” in store for us. Who would imagine that this all-time-optimistic-phrase could be twisted to play with our psyche and make us consumers (or aspiring consumers) of these so called enhancers?

In one study by Dittmar and colleagues (2006), it was  found that exposure to images of Barbie dolls (reflecting the 36-24-36 ideal) increased bodily dissatisfaction than exposure to Emme dolls (a doll with realistic bodily proportions) or neutral images, in girls as young as 5 and 6 years old! Imagine how seemingly harmless toys are so shaped to slyly corrupt our body image i.e. our own view about our own bodies!

Thus, these are some ideas that help explain the hesitance, guilt, self- deprecation, self- hatred and self- constriction that exists within most of us in varying degrees and very well reflect in the answers that you provided to yourself for the 3 questions I asked you at the beginning.

How to respect your body type?

1. Mirror, Mirror, on the Wall: All of us are aware or even guilty of using the many camera filters that are available. What makes you think that movie stars or even your friends at work may not be using these filters to look “better” than they already do? And even if a picture is #unfiltered, always remember that only the best of your moments find their way onto social media. So your bedroom mirror is where you want to find your true beauty—looking only at yourself, drawing no comparisons, especially with the Photo shopped media pages.
2. Care for a little history? : Among our ancestors, roundness of body was indeed a sign of wealth and attractiveness as indicated by various stone age figurines and paintings found all across the world. This is so because those times were marked by food shortages and so voluptuousness was indeed a beautiful feature. Thus, embrace your curves for they were not always a bad thing and who know, you may eventually be able to bring them back in vogue for time-appropriate reasons!
3. Body beyond beauty: Appreciate your body for the tool it has provided you to achieve your many aspirations than being simply wound up in figuring out how beautiful an instrument it is. For instance, value how your body helps you achieve little things like cycling to school or dancing in the rain or hug a loved one.
4. Is the “ideal” really beautiful? : What the ideal body type tends to bring along with it in terms of wealth, suitable romantic partners, self confidence, societal acceptance, and prestige may have more to do with it wrongfully being perceived as beautiful than it actually being beautiful. Maybe we care more about these by-products than about achieving the ideal itself. But since they all tend to more or less CO-OCCUR with the ideal body type that is described, we tend to wrongfully assume that the ideal body type CAUSES these by-products to occur. If causation was true, how do you explain the success of personalities like Barack Obama, Oprah Winfrey, Bhumi Pednekar and many others who don’t meet the “ideal” in certain obvious ways? Thus, breaking this incorrect linkage will go a long way in questioning the beauty stereotypes.

The above described methods can be handy in dealing with the milder body-related insecurities that most of us have. But, do you know that some individuals suffer from full-blown psychological illness categorized as EATING DISORDERS due to ill-formed body image? What are these and how they can be dealt with will be covered by a series of upcoming blog posts. Stay tuned!