Skinny shaming is just as bad as fat shaming

I see something happening on Insta. With Anna, with Negin, with Gigi, with many others. Comments like: ‘Wow, shouldn’t you eat something?’ ‘Ew, skinny!’ ‘Where has your beautiful body gone?’ Where does all this skinny shaming suddenly come from?

I recently talked about it with a friend who has lost a lot of weight. He had always been a bit overweight and decided to work on a healthier version of himself. Result? Minus 25 kilos. And suddenly his surroundings started to complain. ‘Hey, are you okay?’ ‘Are you eating enough?’ ‘Aren’t you overdoing it with sports?’ For the first time in his life, he had no overweight but a healthy weight. And that caused resistance in his social circle, because they had always known him with a fuller face.

When someone around you loses a lot of weight in a short time, we have something to say about it. Sometimes we feel – strangely enough – worse about ourselves. Because we don’t (exercise as much). Because they do pay attention to what they eat every day. By the way, we also find someone who is healthy to be boring. And if you do it anyway, please don’t flaunt it on Insta, because then we get aggressive. Apparently, we find it socially less acceptable to address someone about their overweight than about someone’s skinny body. And yet body shaming is extraordinarily painful for both thin and fuller people.

Imagine you just posted a (what you think is) beautiful vacation picture on Instagram and the first thing you see are ‘Ew, skinny! Go eat something!’ comments from people you don’t even know. Maybe you are a model and are expected to pay attention. Maybe you have always been slim. Maybe you started paying better attention to your nutrition and lost about 12 kilos. But who are we to have an opinion about that? As long as someone looks ‘skinny’ but not ‘unhealthy’, then it should all be fine, right?

In times of the whole Body Positivity movement, I think we should be just as strict about skinny shaming as we are about fat shaming. Being skinny is quickly associated with an eating disorder, but that is of course 9 out of 10 times nonsense. Everyone is different, also in terms of body structure. Plus: online bullying is not okay at all, whether that person is size 34 or 46. Period.

Image credits: Instagram Negin Mirsalehi, Gigi Hadid, Anna Nooshin