I must say for a teenage girl I have always been pretty confident about my body. I have never been a twig but am also not overweight and have never felt bothered by my appearance. Every year, I fly to Germany to spend two months with my slightly crazy family – especially my grandma, the boss of the family and a woman who inspires me deeply. So you can imagine the sharp sting I felt when the last time I arrived at the family home and greeted my grandmother she kissed me, gave me a once over and declared: “My, have you grown. And fat.” I hadn’t seen the woman who means the world to me in six months, and all she could do was comment on my body.
A million thoughts started racing through my mind. The first was, “But my BMI is perfectly normal” followed by “I still wear the same size.” But instead of actually saying these things, I changed the subject and went on as if I hadn’t heard the comment. After all, I thought, my gran is known for having no filter.
As the week progressed, I spent time with my cousin who is a year younger than me and is slightly overweight. Her mother, who is very thin, often criticizes her weight and my grandmother also makes snide comments about extra helpings of ice cream. Luckily, though, my cousin is very confident and doesn’t give a damn about what people think about her.
But then, a few days later, when talking about clothes my grandmother told my cousin and me that our “mannequin size days are over.” I wanted to tell her that I never had “mannequin size days” because I am a human, but instead kept my mouth shut and once again said nothing, pretending as though I hadn’t heard. She is the elder and I can’t talk back, I told myself, and also I have never been good at comebacks.
My grandma spent the rest of the week making comments like those and I felt them start to affect my confidence. The final straw was when I overheard her talking to my aunt, whom she told that three diets had to occur in the house: one for the dog, one for my cousin, and one for me because, as she put it, “At this rate, her huge ass will scare people away.”
I went to the bathroom and spent forty-five minutes crying and staring at my “huge” ass, then soon after went through pictures of me, examining my “huge” ass. I spent the night thinking about my “huge” ass. The next day I did research, measured myself and, through comparison, determined that I really am a perfectly normal size and felt vindicated.
But then I realized that doing research to validate positive feelings about my body had been stupid. While my first reaction was to feel happy that I measured up as “normal”, the truth is that my exact size doesn’t really matter. All that matters is how I feel about my body, and I knew that I couldn’t let anybody else — even my grandmother — let me feel badly about myself.
My point is this: Please do not beat yourself about your appearance or let others make you feel badly about it. Use the time you would spend obsessing about certain body parts to do something productive and impact your future instead.
