A child who’d given in, to the DEMANDS of how the adults thought she should be, this, is truly, AWFUL for the child to weather through, translated…
Mimi Chou as a best friend, let’s call her “May”. She’s a little older than seven years old, and already held a LOT of the gender specific stereotypes, these couple of months, Mimi Chou told me repeatedly, May always spoke of losing weight, said she’d needed to do it, that she must be super thin, in order to look beautiful. And apparently, Mimi was quite affected by this, she’d kept pressing me, “Mommy, am I too fat?”, and I’d always told her, “You’re not fat, you and May are both, quite thinly.”
But the issue of losing weight didn’t leave her talks at all, we’d gone to play last week, in the hotel beds, she’d started doing an assortment of very difficult stretches and exercises, at first, she’d only asked me if she was amazing, then suddenly, she’d done a move, that made a piece of her flesh protrude, she’d pinched the protruding piece, said, “This is it, losing weight is losing all of these, extra pieces of fat on my body!”
I’d opened up my eyes wide, looked at her, I’d needed to, take a deep breath, to calm myself down, to talk to her again. It wasn’t that I was mad at her, but this society had, instilled the WRONG ideas about being fat and the need to lose your weight.
I’d given her a long speech, if I could, I’d hoped, that the children of this world, disregarding their ages, gender, from a very young age, can hear it, instead of getting taken over by the waves of society that believed, “being heavy is bad, being thin is good”, that the children needed to work extremely hard, to persuade themselves, “I like my body.”
don’t you want your own child to stay as happy as this for longer??? Or, would you rather that s/he started worrying about the way s/he looked too soon, huh??? Photo from online…
I’d told her, “Mimi, what I’m about to tell you, is very important, I hope you will remember it forever. First, you’re NOT fat, you’re very slim, and, exercise is for the sake of staying healthy, and NOT losing the weight, a lot of people talked about how they’d needed to work out more to lose the weight, but that’s not a definite, and there are a lot of people who are big in size who are excellent in the sports too, and they’re all very healthy, even healthier than people who are thin but don’t exercise at all.”
Secondly, there are two kinds of healthy, first, biologically, and, surely, the doctors tell us that fatter people would be at high risk for hypertension and diabetes, but as we’re still in the realms of our healthy weights by the medical definitions, we’re told we need to diet, to lose weight; and yet, weighing in at seventy or eighty kilograms you’re still quite alive, but, if you lost weight to thirty-six kilograms, you will die! Other than hypertension and diabetes, there’s another kind of illness called anorexia/bulimia, and most cases usually happen on the older girls in puberty, a bit older than you are right now, because they’d kept wanting to lose weight, in the end, they couldn’t even eat anything if they’d wanted to, and we failed to tell children how awful these illnesses can be.
Another kind of health is psychological, think about it, if everybody tells you you’re too fat, and whenever you start eating, people say, “You’re so fat already, and still eat?”, “What are you, a pig?”, “Stop eating already!”, wouldn’t you be in a bad mood?
a young child like this is often ostracized…not my photo
Mimi Chou hadn’t gotten talked at so quickly by me a lot, she felt scared, said, “but the fattest kid in my class was told all of what you’d said by everybody.” I’d told her, if everybody keeps on taunting her/him, would s/he not be in a bad mood, and need to eat more food? And, when we’re in a foul mood, don’t we both want to go and splurge too?
Toward these harsh standards of being fat, it’s so prevalent, and even those thin people who’d placed everybody else under that sort of a harsh microscope also place oneself under the same microscope, and demanded it of themselves too. Toward these sorts of pressures by the numbers, “We must love ourselves became, nothing more than words. When will we finally see, that we’re all, affected by these sorts of mainstream beliefs such as “thin=good”?
This is still ALL due to socialization, like this young child who’d been called fat, because she’s a bit chubbier, but, nobody teaches this young child, that it’s NORMAL to be a bit chubby when you’re younger, I too, was a bit on the chubby side too, and I got taunted by all of my families (don’t remind me of those days again!!!), and, growing up in that, I KNOW exactly how it feels, to be told that you’re too fat, and, this is happening on a very young child, and, this child, if the adults don’t change the way in treating her, she will totally, develop an irreversible eating disorder that will probably, kill her. And yes, in THIS case, the socialization will become the culprit of murder of this young person’s life. Besides, everybody’s body type IS different, you can’t ask someone with a larger bone structure to fit the criteria of weight for the individual with a smaller frame!
Life, the Obstacle Course 