Social media and in fact any sort of media whether it’s magazines, TV adverts or posters you see at bus stops can be both good and evil. Their purpose is to influence as well as to manipulate, advise and inform in addition to persuade. Regardless, it is both a beneficial tool and a powerful weapon; everyone will always have an opinion, and this is mine.
MY RANT
Not too long ago, Cosmopolitan released that famous picture of a big woman on the front (can I say ‘big’?) and the word HEALTH appeared on the front, indicating that health doesn’t have a number. Unfortunately, it does. Why do you think GPs have number regulations for bodyweight, a cholesterol number that’s deemed low or high (safe or dangerous) or a blood pressure number that indicates how close and how prone you are to a heart attack? These are all used as guidelines to monitor individuals so they know if they are at risk, otherwise it would be morally wrong to allow the human population to have complete free reign and a blaze’ attitude towards death. The truth of the matter is, if you are an individual who lives an extremely sedentary lifestyle and your daily food intake is consumed with takeaways, alcohol or even just excessive amounts of food, you are more prone to heart disease, heart attacks, diabetes, high blood pressure etc etc the list is endless. Health should ALWAYS be a number one priority. You can be massively underweight and be at death’s door too. So regardless of size (big or small), health does come with some number guidelines.
Personal opinions on size differ greatly, especially in this day and age and seems everyone has an opinion especially when celebrities in particular put on weight on slim down. We have become so politically correct (on some occasions I think a bit silly but I’ll stick to this topic for now) that it’s ok to say to someone ‘wow, you’ve lost weight, you look really good’, but it’s not ok to say to someone they have put on weight or that they are unhealthy, because understandably it would upset that individual and affect their body confidence. Think about it in this way: you would advise and warn a best friend who is constantly drinking or snorting coke everyday because you know it is a danger to their health, so why is it acceptable to allow them to eat themselves into oblivion, knowing they are one step away from a heart attack? Is that not just as bad? Or not because eating is considered or deemed more socially acceptable? I’ll let you contemplate that one.
I totally get that companies and businesses use the size tactic to make women especially feel more confident and increase self esteem by having Dove adverts that have women of all sizes, Gym Shark IG posts that have bigger models and plus size clothing lines and mannequins in shops being a size 14-16. I totally get it’s a great selling tactic to appeal to the masses, but to be honest, when people start claiming that being a size 18-20 at 5 ft 2 is healthy, is completely WRONG. And yes, I would be saying exactly the same if it was a ‘big’ man on the front of Men’s Health magazine, so please don’t pull the gender card on me.
What I did not like about the Cosmopolitan saga was the fact that a lot of people threw the gender card in there, which being a woman myself, is totally ridiculous. A lot of feminists all jumped on the band wagon about female self-love and female body confidence, when in fact this was moving away from the main point itself. A lot of words like ‘fat-shaming’ were being thrown around. The point is, if this woman was just promoting a lipstick, no one would have intervened and started calling her ‘fat’ or ‘unhealthy’. I think the point was that Cosmo were claiming a larger than average woman to be healthy, which as already mentioned about numbers, science does not lie. The more overweight or even morbidly obese a person is, the more prone they are to respiratory problems. Remember the science: the bigger you are, the more fat cells you have, the narrower your vessels become, the less oxygen you have passed around your body, the more prone you are to a heart attack and other diseases. It’s not nice and it’s not healthy.
There is a big difference between fat shaming and promoting a healthy lifestyle. I am not a ‘fat-phobic troll’ or ‘fat-phobic asshole’ like many writers online have claimed about anyone having an opinion about the Cosmo health issue. I’m not lean myself (currently) and am not talking about people who have put on a few pounds. I am talking about ANY individual who is in danger of said heart attacks, heart diseases, cancers etc. Whether you know you need to change but aren’t doing anything about it, or you’ve been told by a GP that you must do something to change your lifestyle, why are you ignoring it? You must consider the people around you, they are the ones that will be suffering when you are buried in the ground.
My job is all about promoting health, getting people to live longer, getting strong mentally and physically and working towards having the body confidence that so many people lack. Believe me, it’s not about being skinny either, I would equally comment if I saw an unhealthily skinny person on the front of that Cosmo magazine and they were claiming that was ‘healthy’-it’s not. I think that many individuals who claim people fat shame think that those same people believe skinny and underweight is healthy, and this is not the case at all.
The reality is, the majority of people in this country are overweight and aren’t health conscious enough. It is only when something really bad happens do they have a sudden epiphany (if they’re lucky!) whether it’s to stop drinking or smoking, or start eating better and living a more active lifestyle.
Let me give you a little snippet about why I value my health, and why it is nothing to do with aesthetics, nothing to do with thinking I’m better than anyone else, or to do with looking super shredded because it’s not. I come from a family of extremely overweight people. My Grandad had a heart attack and died when I was 2, sadly my dad had 3 heart attacks recently at exactly the same age as his own dad and luckily survived and is now turning his life around. I come from a family where nearly everyone is overweight and sedentary, the majority being on high blood pressure tablets, being either pre-diabetic or actually diabetic, survivors of cancer and some sadly who didn’t survive and many who suffer with their mental health and will be on tablets for the rest of their life. Anton and I are the only two people in our whole entire family on both sides that are health conscious and train (and apparently we are the weird ones!)
The fact is, I don’t want to make my life harder, I want to make my life easier. Yes, I could cross the road tomorrow and get hit by a car and die, life is unpredictable and yes, life is for LIVING. But one thing I do know: I want to set myself and my body up in the best way in order to give it the best chance of life.
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