I've talked about this before because now I've been on both sides. I've gotten fat hate and skinny hate. Quite frankly both are annoying and demeaning.
Heck even when I was fat I hated the phrase "real women have curves," because no, not all women have curves and making thin women feel bad about their bodies is just as bad as making larger women feel bad about their bodies too.
I always thought when I reached my goal that I wouldn't have to worry about that. I was
kind of right. When I hit 140 (my original goal) I looked normalish because most people around us in America are overweight and obese. At 115 I don't look so normal to people now and I do have strangers commenting on my weight. Usually to the tone of "oh, you're so small, do you eat?" Admittedly most people guess my weight to be 15-20lbs less than what I really weigh, likely because of strength training.
I'm looking at buying a new car right now and I remember when I was test driving a car and I was talking to the salesman. I told him about my job as a special ed teacher, etc. and he commented "oh I hope you don't deal with any really bad kids, you're not a very big person they could hurt you." That turned me off completely from buying from him for a number of reasons, but for the purposes of staying on topic I'll just stick with the one about my body. Why did he assume that because I was "small" I would be weak and all that? If I can hold back my 6'3" 190lb fiance I think I can handle a lot of other things too!
I'm also tired of size 0 hate. I'm curvy, I have an hourglass figure and I wear a size 0. People need to deal with that and stop thinking that in order to get to a size 0 you need to starve yourself or something. I'm 5'3". I think size 0 is a perfectly adequate size for a person of my height.
Luckily I'm in a place mentally where I just roll my eyes at people or I talk back. Or I'll show them how wrong they are. I've done it in my weight training class! "Can you lift all of that? You're so tiny!" "Watch me
" The look on their face is priceless.
If I wasn't mentally in the right place like I am now, I could seriously see myself developing some real issues. That's why as much as I sometimes wish I would have done this whole weight loss thing as a teen, there was
no way I would have been in the right place mentally during the process and no way would I have been able to deal with the way society reacts to people at either ends of the spectrum. I'm glad I did it now, when I am a strong, confident woman.
Ok, that came out really long, but it's something that's been bugging me. I can deal with skinny hate and fat hate right now and be fine. What about insecure teenagers who are bombarded with this stuff on a regular basis?