Skinny shaming is so accepted

[chickenbhunalambbhunaprawnbhunamuchroomrice]

I know a lot of people will disagree with me on this, but skinny shaming is so wildly accepted and tolerated due to slim people being at an advantage due to their body size. As if it's acceptable, because they're slim. I've been body shamed my whole life for being slim. Right from when I was at junior school, to now at 30 years old.

I was relentlessly bullied at school and college. I am not an anomaly, I am a 5'5 size 6-8 female with a normal BMI. I don't need to be shamed about my body. The only people who have ever shamed or bullied me about my weight have been fat or obese people. And I'll be honest I'm trying my hardest not to judge them for their eating habits and size, but when it's a running theme I am starting to think that only fat people have a problem with slim people.

'Skinny privilege' shouldn't be an excuse to exempt bullying and shameful behaviour.
Stop trying to normalise skinny shaming just because it's the 'more desirable' image. It's not our fault that agenda has been pushed so much.

AIBU to think that skinny shaming is just as bad as fat shaming, and that slim people aren't to an advantage on this? I don't believe in the whole 'well at least you're skinny and being shamed.' Interested to know others thoughts.

I don't believe that fat women are going up to slim women and body shaming and insulting them.

It doesn't happen.

You are making this claptrap up.

No I didn’t think they were saying these things because they were jealous and it did hurt. These comments where made when I was younger and I was really paranoid about my weight as a teen/early 20s. I was skinny with small boobs, I felt like I had a childish body, and I wanted to be bigger, not over weight but curvier.

The issue with your whole premise is that you have pitted your argument as fat vs skinny - just complain about the issue impacting you rather than i got skinny shamed - fucking fat people are twats ' you have never tried not to judge fat people as you claim imo.

And purely on your issue of people being unpleasant about your weight or.body shape - yanbu, no one should comment on other people's bodies unless they have requested an opinion-.even if they think they have a valid point about health 'it is no-one else's business.

@Allfur what's borderline obsessive? I've got a commercial photography degree love, pipe down.

I was fat and now I am not and I get a lot more frequent comments made to me, many of which are hurtful and I don’t like it. I wouldn’t have liked it when I was fat but overall people I know were nicer to me, weight didnt come up in conversation like it does now. People were more likely to say I looked nice, to be nice. I was aware of a generalised negative perception against me when I was fat just because I was fat, but no one in my life really said much to me during that time. I was aware of the healthcare outcomes (lose weight fixes everything) and I would see negative abuse online about fatness but it was never really at ME and felt personal. Now it is. It’s usually directly about my looks in some way, what I eat etc. I do think it comes from a jealousy sadly - I’ve heard people making sly jokes about how long until I put it all back on again too. I feel like I have lost all my personality and now I am just reduced to what I look like. I can see how for some people this is an ego boost but for me, it’s pretty miserable in reality. I would like one day to go by where I do not get comments or looked up and down or creeped on by sleazy men. I did not lose weight to be socially accepted and it can be a misconception that that will be the case

I go on TikTok and there is a lady who had a gastric sleeve earlier this year and she has lost a lot of weight. Her comments section is absolutely awful. People telling her she looks gaunt, sick, too thin, she will die, her saggy skin is disgusting. It’s really awful. It feels like as women we can never do anything right.

I do think there are experiences to be recognised and that women are cruel to one another, let’s not pretend we aren’t. Thin women are asking for the comments to stop and I believe fat women deserve the exact same. Two wrongs do not make a right and it shouldn’t be a competition or fair game for thin people

Your description of your experiences rings so true @thelever and I completely see the way that the negativity has differed for you, and the intrusive and unwelcome nature of people's opinions about your body.

I think the woman with the gastric sleeve gets all the vileness of fat shaming and thin shaming all at once. It's the same for people on weight loss injectables - there is a contempt for how they achieved the weight loss, a cruel perception of them as still being a fat person kind of inherently, jibes that they're cheating or took some kind of easy way out and that ties into perceptions of fat people as lazy, the bullying insistence that even after weight loss she's still ugly and disgusting and then all of the insults about being gaunt and ill and the thinness of her body now being wrong.

I also don't think there needs to be a comparison between thin and fat shaming, and I think it's a shame that this thread was started in a tone which does expressly pit the two against each other as that's created a massive argument when actually there is a really thought-provoking and useful conversation to have, and a lot of common ground.

Your obsession with body shape

I really don't believe it is just 'fat' women that announce this stuff to so called thin women, what about medium sized women do they say anything? What about thin men, do they say anything as IME many men love commenting on everything, having their opinion stated. When I was very thin most comments were from men, men that were thin. With men from my family and extended family it was out of concern but I didn't care what they thought. I think it's an extension of them trying to fix something they perceive to be a problem.

Since genetics came up earlier, I thought this was a really interesting article to see today, about research into the role genes play in fussy eating. The study shows that genetics is more of a driver than environment, though nurture still has an influence.

An approach like this takes some of the heat out of the issue. Parents of fussy eaters can feel less anxious that they're to blame, they can receive less judgement of their parenting and it might help them to adopt the strategies that can help without the same level of frustration and shame.

If we could think hey, maybe fat people are fighting a battle with genetics, that a fat person might not be behaving in a gluttonous way but simply responding to their body's cues and signals which differ to a thin person's - that could take out some of the blame and shame, making that person less defensive and upset and more empowered to find solutions - to focus on the environmental factors that can change rather than the inbuilt ones that feel impossible to conquer. And likewise, it could stop the snide judgement of thin people just enjoying a salad and stop people from assuming that they're somehow virtue signalling or that they don't really like it but want to show that they're better than everyone else or whatever narrative someone constructs about someone just trying to eat their lunch. We could have compassion and understanding on both sides, acceptance that people are different and more tolerance of people's motivations if we stopped inferring the worst interpretation of them.

www.theguardian.com/food/2024/sep/20/fussy-eating-in-children-largely-down-to-genetics-research-shows

I’m pretty sure I have a naturally higher hunger hormone than some other people I am permanently hungry, it’s just now I have taught myself ways to manage it, and it’s not easy by any feat of the imagination and it’s my choice to do it.

Over Consumption of food has been demonised for a long time, it is based somewhat in religion as it’s seen as greed. It would signify purity and dedication to go without food or resist temptation. through many historical times obesity was a sign of wealth as you could afford to eat whatever you wanted and a lot of men ended up with ‘gluttonous’ self induced gout. There were still fat poor people as diets were poor and a lot of people in poverty drank a lot of alcohol (water wasn’t safe) it’s just there was also a lot of poverty where people couldn’t afford to eat much. We don’t live in those times now, food is more abundant than ever unfortunately it’s now ultra processed and so easily available.

Just from my own perspective yes I knew how to count calories and I knew about nutrition but I was still eating and drinking hundreds of extra calories a day for years on end pretty mindlessly just trying to get through the day. I would not say I was greedy. I was time and financially poor and didn't have the bandwidth to spend time and money on dedicating myself to weight loss. My weight loss has been so so expensive, time and energy consuming. I liken it to my experience of getting a puppy. You really want one so you get one and realise how much hard work it is and how expensive and wonder what you have got yourself into and now you have to keep putting in the work for a very long time. I know it’s not the same for everyone and I probably have a genetic advantage of some kind. I don’t know what it’s like to be naturally thin so I have no judgment as I don’t think it always takes that much effort to be naturally thin but it takes a lot of effort to become thin from fat and we should not underestimate just how hard it is

"Most people are fat are obese"

OP- Your own post shows your real position on this. You clearly realise people who are overweight, and are doing a weird reverse to push your point home.

It's PA bullying and it's not clever.

Bullies will bully whatever. You could be perfect and a bully will find something.

But being bullied because you're overweight is everywhere. Being told what to eat, not to eat, how to eat, when to eat. Being shamed for your dress size, your calf size, your arm size.

It's not only bullies who bully overweight people. It's society as a whole.

There's countless examples on this thread where it's happened.
Perhaps it doesn't happen to you, but it happens to us. Are you slim / skinny?
If not, then you can't dismiss what is happened to us.

@allfur

Obsession with body shape, yet I'm not the one going up to people telling them about it shaming them 😂 you seem a bit bitter to be honest.

I have never had a bloke comment on my weight in a negative way or shameful way. It's always been women. Some medium sized, mostly overweight or obese. Even the kids at school who used to bully me were much bigger.

I'm stating a well known fact about the U.K. population, if you think that's bullying, take it up with gov.co.uk website.

You speak about yourself like a protected group. The reality is many people who are not naturally thin so that's 99% of the country have to make an effort with weight maintenance and therefore many of us have been 'very thin' and overweight in our lifetime so we do 'know' what it is like and in all honesty as my aim was to be thin when I was younger, when people commented I didn't care as in my mind that meant I had achieved my aim.

It's because they're just jealous fat cows op.

Is that what you want someone to say because you've been hinting not very subtlety at it for most of the thread.

Anyway there you go.

I promise my 20y daughter is not making this up. Though the mean girls at uni saying stuff to her eg that she will never find a boyfriend as she looks like a stick insect, I think are average size rather than fat.

That kinds proves my point, that you are investing way too much energy into it - and literally no idea where the bitter comment comes from

We're all bitter and jealous...

@Allfur

Maybe perhaps you should redirect your digs to the bullies who have shamed me and bullied me for the best part of 25 years for my weight. Maybe ask them why I'm so 'obsessed' with how I look. Oh but it doesn't matter does it, because at least I'm slim.

I still don't understand why you have been bullied and shamed for 25 years about your weight. You are bang on average sized - not underweight (at all), not large.

I'm really surprised by that tbh. Ime whenever a woman has a body shape outside of mainstream attractive they get way more hassle from men. I mean you don't get women hanging out of vans shouting 'hey fatty' or 'don't run your legs will snap' to women they consider too thin or too fat.

@CharlotteBog I don't understand either, which was partly what prompted my post on here. It seems a lot of other normal / slim women have been through the same.