How to resolve self-confidence issues related to weight gain?

How do you feel when you look at your body in the mirror? Viewing the bulges and folds on the tummy and back, perhaps the double chin on the neck, the bingo wings on the arms and the cellulite on the thighs, many women think that if they were thinner they would achieve a better life, a better career or the partner of their dreams.

Every year when the new year begins, one of the most common and popular resolutions is to lose weight. Gym memberships start increasing exponentially, weight loss adverts soar in numbers and many people start documenting their weight loss journey on blogs or YouTube almost creating a fomo (fear of missing out) effect for others. To me all this implies that losing weight is one of the main goals of life and that a slimmer body is the norm. All of us who are plump or chubby or fat have somehow deviated from the norm and it is our duty to return to this ‘normal’ state of being by grinding our bodies at the gym, taking food supplements or dieting. The fat in our bodies is seen as the enemy which needs to be expunged at all costs.

But how do we know that we are overweight and unhealthy? Gym instructors and some health practitioners use the Body Mass Index (BMI) which uses our height and weight to calculate if we are overweight. Did you know that the BMI was devised in the 1830s by Lambert Quetelet who was a mathematician and not a physician? Several studies (see links at the end) have already shown that the BMI is an inadequate measurement as it doesn’t show if a person is healthy or not but this knowledge has still not been shared and accepted widely. A high BMI doesn’t necessarily mean that a person is unhealthy. Factors such as age, sex and occupation also need to be taken into account.

The question arises that why is there still so much fat shaming in many societies? The accumulation of fat in a person’s body doesn’t always arise from gluttony as a lot of critics of fat bodies tend to think; there are underlying issues that contribute to a person accumulating body fat ranging from trauma to social circumstances and even genetics. While the underlying conditions of being overweight that impact a person’s health need to be medically attended to as a priority, I want to address the relationship between confidence and weight gain and discuss why a lot of women who are healthy but not skinny lose their sense of self-esteem.

Let us first address why we become under-confident with gain in body weight. We lose self confidence when we think of our body only as a tool that provides us with societal appreciation. When you were born, you never really cared about being fat or thin, you just focused on existing. It was only through observations drawn from your immediate society and the media that you learned that your body needs to look a certain way. You forget that your body serves a more important function than just looking good. All the organs in your body enable you to survive, your skin protects you and your mind enables you to navigate everyday life. All this is forgotten in the desire to attain a beauty ideal-that of being skinny.

What does being skinny really mean? Did you know that it was only in the 20th century that being skinny as an ideal of beauty became popular? I can never forget Kate Moss’s statement “Nothing tastes as good as skinny feels” implying to me that those who are overweight are gluttons who can’t control their desire for food.

If you look at classical paintings of women up until the end of the 19th century, you will find the women are shown as curvy rather than skinny. I can’t remember any painting where women are shown to be skinny unless they belong to the lower class or caste. Just consider Leonardo da Vinci’s Mona Lisa which is arguably the most famous painting of a woman. If you look at her closely, you will see a double chin and chubby arms and hands. In Asia, if you look at any of the sculptures in the temples you will find fuller and curvier figures.

This completely changed in the 20th century when women entered the corporate world and started working outside the home. You will find that feminine styles of dressing were discarded for suits for women as they started occupying higher positions of authority in the business world. In films up until very recently, you would rarely find an overweight female actor playing the lead. As images of these successful women circulated in mainstream media, a woman’s success started being equated with being skinny without regard for the efforts, intelligence, hard work and dedication of those women that led to their success.

The desire for being skinny reached new heights in the 21st century with Size 0 becoming the most desirable size for women. If you watched the most famous tv series based on women Sex and the City which aired between 1998 and 2004, all the lead characters are skinny. In Friends too, Monica becomes desirable only after she loses weight.

Being skinny is one form of beauty ideal out of many. Some women are born skinny and stay that way throughout their lives. The problem arises when the desire to be skinny makes girls/ women develop unhealthy relationship with food to the extent of developing anorexia, bulimia and other eating disorders. If you observe closely, we often say that ‘I have been naughty’ or ‘I have been bad today’ as I ate a piece of cake. This ideology of banishing fat has permeated our everyday life unconsciously.

The problem has arisen because we have started seeing being skinny as a signifier of being successful which has also been reinforced by mainstream media to a large extent but thankfully through social media some of these ideologies are slowing shifting to make way for the acceptance of new forms of body aesthetics.

So in such times, how do you deal with self-confidence issues? I propose these methods which have helped me in developing my self-confidence: