Not many of the overweight people seem happy with their bodies. A part of their discomfort is their weight of course and the left case is dealt by the body shaming and social disapproval. No matter if you are obese or not, bad comments always leave you in the thoughts. Some people get out of it at sudden due to their strong self-esteem while the rest of them spend their lives hating themselves.
This is what we see every day around us and we feel it okay to say an obese person that “You need to lose weight”. As if they don’t know it. Well, experts say that sometimes friendly bashing motivates people to work for their weight loss but too many times or all the time? It is scientifically and medically dangerous.
Body Shaming Affects Emotions
Among 5 stages of Erikson’s personality development theory, not many people cross the self-esteem level. Those who switch to self-actualization are rare and they are those who don’t care about what people think or say at all. They know that where they stand in life and who and what they are. They take compliments lightly, thank people and move. While majority of people who strive for self-esteem for the whole of their lives gets affected by each and every word people say about them. And if that person is obese and usually receives body shaming comments, his mental health is already ruined.
Instead of planning and making an effort to lose weight, these people get depressed and spend their days thinking about it. This depression and stress alters the transmission of neural messages and interferes with hormones too. And these hormones let your body store even more fats.
Body Shaming Affects Physical Body Too
A recent research published in the Journal of Obesity revealed that if a person is prone to “weight-bias internalization”, he/she is at relatively higher risk of developing metabolic diseases such as heart stroke, diabetes, increased LDL etc.
Weight-Bias Internalization is a term which is used professionally to describe the situation when people are aware of the whole negative stereotypical drama about obesity and they apply those stereotypes to themselves and feel inferior and less self-confident.
To study the effects of weight-bias internalization on the physical health of the victims Peal and colleagues conducted a study at Penn’s Center for Weight and Eating Disorder funded by Eisai Pharmaceutical Co. The study involved 159 clinically enrolled obese women to check the effects of weight loss medicines.
The organizers ask the participant women to report how strongly they agreed or disagreed with the statements like “I hate myself for being overweight”. These women were also examined for different metabolic diseases such as high cholesterol level, heart diseases, blood pressure and diabetes.
After dealing the demographic factors such as age, race, gender, and BMI they focused their analysis over weight-bias internalization. The results reported that women who fell in top half of the weight-bias internalization were 3 times more prone to metabolism syndromes than those who were at the lower half.
The study was still unable to find a cause and effect relationship but still, the research showed that how our harsh words can ruin someone’s life emotionally and physically.
Be empathetic, feel for others and try to solve problems without getting rude.
