Pranav Dawar
TRIGGER WARNING: Bullying, Body Image
“Work out and get abs or you won’t pick up girls” is probably the most common advice given to a skinny guy. The second most common thing told to them is that people will exploit them, almost as if being thin gives others a free pass to bully. In some cases, being thin is not a choice but it’s just the way a person is. This is a point not understood by society because for them, working out and eating right will solve this “problem”. The truth about skinny shaming is that it is not given as much importance as fat shaming.
I have been shamed for being skinny since I was a child. As a 7-year-old, it never really affected me much because I was taught to laugh with the relatives when they asked my parents if they even fed me. From a very young age, I was pressured to gain weight. This pressure increased during high school when I saw a lot of boys way stronger and better built than me receiving more attention. Due to this, I stopped wearing shorts to school, but the one day I wore them, people made fun of me for having “chicken legs”. I even stopped wearing half sleeves at parties. I took bad advice from a lot of people and followed it by performing incorrect workouts that I practiced for a year which in turn adversely impacted my body.
My own friends made fun of me for being skinny. My parents were asking me to build muscles or I'd be bullied in college. All these issues just added to my stress and there was a time when all I could think about was this. But, during that phase, I made some new friends who helped me. I grew a lot more confident and learned how to ignore skinny jokes thrown at me every day. There was just one mistake I made, I wasn't speaking up for myself and just kept avoiding. I thought if I showed others that I was getting offended, people wouldn’t like me anymore and wouldn’t consider me “cool”.
Skinny shaming is a form of bullying accepted by society. This needs to be given as much importance as fat-shaming as it affects people’s mental health. Stereotypes like men should have abs and women should have large breasts needs to be stopped and the first stage of doing that is by accepting that skinny shaming is not a joke, but an actual form of bullying.
Everyone needs to understand that a person’s true nature is not shown by their body, but by their personality.