Pictures of fit girls have always been a major trend on Instagram. Nobody knows when though, since a certain kind of opposing voice started emerging on the same platform. They started off by commenting on the fit posts, criticizing them for “exerting pressure on women with socially constructed standards of beauty”, and that “love your body no matter how it looks” is in fact the healthy mentality.
“Worry about loving yourself. Instead of loving the idea of other people loving you.”
“Loving your body the way it is, is ok.”
And so on.
Admittedly, it has become a certain kind of social consensus that fit bodies, abs, cute hips and slim thighs are aesthetically more pleasing and sexually more appealing, and the more this idea prevails the society, the more it roots into people’s mindset and sometimes drives people to put extra efforts in order to match with this idea.
After a while of this being the standard of a beautiful figure, some girls started going the extreme for reaching that goal. It no doubt becomes unhealthy when some of them starts having one meal a day, and anorexia, consequently, becomes an increasingly common problem in the society.
Naturally, certain posts come up to appeal against “perfect body” posts in an attempt to counter this mentality that tends to go overwhelmingly extreme.
Now, when you open Instagram or any other kind of social media, two different kinds of posts pop up on the “trending” section: “fit posts” encouraging people to be fit, and “every body deserves love” posts encouraging people not to make changes on their bodies.
This has long been a debate among American people, but it is only been recently since the negate is gaining more supporting voice. People who used to feel guilty about eating one extra cookie during each meal—they don’t feel guilty anymore because their behavior is justified as “not surrendering to social norms”.
In this article, I want to remind people that just like anorexia, obesity is ill. Going to an extreme diet to keep fit is not healthy, but certainly neither is neglecting the fact that the US is currently the country with the 3rd most obese people among its adult citizens (more concrete data can be found here: http://stateofobesity.org/adult-obesity/).
As a girl coming from China, a country where sugar, diary and animal fat do not dominate people’s normal diet, I still cannot say that I fully approve of American people’s eating habits. Take college dining halls as an example. From my daily observation, I can conclude that more than a half of the students in college can be accounted for being obese, and the cause of this extreme amount of obesity is evident in dining halls.
Buffet-style dining is the least helpful for people to maintain self-control, especially when ice-cream, cakes and cookies are always abundant. I never fail to see people using large bowls to hold ice-cream that is supposed to be in small cones. During M&Cs, there always are people grabbing at least five of the desserts and eat them up all at once. Countless BBQs, fries and greasy sautés pile up in their plates and no one is there to stop them. The fat and sugar accumulated in their stomach already way exceed their daily needs.
Not meaning to generalize, but a high-sugar diet is considered by the rest of the world a signature American-style diet. People who are born into this social environment can hardly ingest a healthy amount of sugar in their diet—sweets are always up for grabs, and they taste amazingly good. It is very easy to lose self-constraint in front of them.
I would say that luckily there are posts on Instagram encouraging people to go on healthier diet by presenting pictures of healthier bodies—of course, at the same time prettier to the majority of people, but are healthier as a scientific fact. And there are more and more people trying to achieve this goal by moderately constraining themselves.
I also don’t approve people challenging either “fitting social norms” or “accommodating what others like” by means of presenting visibly obese bodies. Even if we put “pleasing others” off the table, encouraging people to be unhealthily fat is not right. This country is already well-functioned organs for Oreos, Nutella and coke, all of which pile up unnecessary fat around people’s organs. Don’t give people more excuses to grab another one of them.
Low self-control is not something to be proud of. Keeping a healthy diet and workout certainly can be pleasing yourself rather than pleasing the society.
As one of my friend once said: “Just start by not drinking that one extra gallon of Coke each week and see what happens.”
