The issue of body policing continues to grow. Worried friends and compassionate family members will praise or condemn you for your weight. These are loving peers with good intentions. However, even the best of intentions can sometimes result in detrimental consequences. It is assumed that if you are slightly overweight your health is in great jeopardy. Having a slimmer figure leads people to assume that you are taking great care of yourself. These are common misconceptions that hurt everybody in more way than one. Nobody is in the right when commenting on another individual’s body. Body Policing also occurs when those who are curvier are considered to be “real" men or women and thinner people are disdained for having the “ideal body type.” Nobody is safe from body policing and it is harmful to everybody regardless of their size.

Until high school, my weight was never something that preoccupied my mind. This changed after I was diagnosed with a thyroid condition that forced my body to increase in mass despite my best efforts. My weight didn’t change significantly, but people’s reactions did. I had been cautious with food and exercise to try to maintain a healthy weight in spite of my condition. My doctors still blamed me instead of realizing the source of my weight gain was the thyroid medication. My friends would attempt to encourage me to work out with them. I wasn’t greatly bothered by my weight change at first, but everybody else was. Eventually, everybody’s comments became so ingrained in my brain that I started thinking about it too. I received a second opinion from a doctor, who told me that my medicine had been causing these weight gains. I lost a lot of weight from a change in thyroid medicine. For a while, I stopped working out and was not as careful of an eater. I wasn’t as healthy as I had been when I gained the weight, but people didn't see the habits that I had developed behind closed doors. They began to praise me for my “progress” anyway. Family members told me how great I looked. My friends informed me that they were so proud of me for being so careful with my eating habits. Trying to be healthy was no longer something that crossed my mind. It was just about the number on the scale. Soon I started associating how loved I was with how high the number on the scale was.

There have been many movements that have tried to counteract the stigmatization and negative treatment of those who bear some extra weight.Sometimes even those who try to spread body positivity are a part of the problem. They simply have traded one form of discrimination in for another. Fat shaming has not ended, but skinny shaming has now become an issue as well. I’ve seen thin people with big followings on social media be insulted for creating false beauty standards. In reality, they are not creating any new problems by having the body that they have.

Another time, I signed into Tumblr and noticed troubling comments on a photo of a girl in a bathing suit.She was slightly larger than what we are accustomed to viewing as “a normal size.” Thousands of users had called her an inspiration simply for her mindless act of sharing a photo to social media. Most of the commentary consisted of users stating that fatter woman should be brave like she was. She had not intended on getting an opinion on her weight from strangers nor did she aim to be an “inspiration”. These comments were insulting and most likely problematic in her eyes. Most of the time, people make these remarks without any indication from the person that they want validation. We have the right to exist and expose ourselves into this weight-obsessed world without these unnecessary judgments.

Truthfully, it doesn’t really matter how thin or fat the person sitting beside us is. Sometimes people have fast or slow metabolisms. Sometimes people have thyroid diseases. Sometimes people just want to consume the food they want in peace.

There is no way to look at another human being and know the story that led them to their weight. There is also no need to know. I am more than the number that I read on the scale when I was sick. I am more than the number that I read on the scale when I got better. I am more than the number of times I have been asked for my weight and felt trapped by the answer. I am more than a body. I deserve to occupy space and so does every individual reading this article. I hope that you all aspire to be healthy. But never let that aspiration cloud your judgment as it did mine. We are more than a weight and deserve more than a world that begs for us to shrink.