By: Conner Williams Editor-in-Chief
As part of Body Image Awareness Week, the Student Health and Counseling Center partnered with the Health and Wellness Center to help promote self-love and to dispel negative connotations towards one’s body image.
Placed around the HWC were different demonstrations that provided motivational phrases, statistics, and an exhibition in the aerobics room that encouraged individuals to “take a break from the mirror and be good to yourself and your body, regardless of appearance” by covering all of the mirrors in sheets.
As someone that has always struggled with my body image, I found the messages around the HWC to be quite compelling; of course people should be encouraged to feel good about themselves regardless of some arbitrary standard of beauty.
Messages were pasted on the mirrors of the HWC, including ones like “It’s not about what size you wear; it’s about how you wear your size!” and “approximately 7 million girls and women struggle with eating disorders.”
But while this spectacle was well-intended, I personally feel that it had the opposite effect on me.
It seems to me that rather than promoting self-love, this campaign has, in fact, attacked or stigmatized those very people that frequent the building in which the messages are placed. I know I don’t exercise and eat well to try and look beautiful in the eyes of others, and I bet a large majority of the people that exercise at HWC feel the same way.
We do it for us, not for you. People ask me all the time why I want to look a certain way. “Don’t you think that’s too much?” “Ew, that’s gross! Way too much muscle.”
Guess what? I don’t care what you think. I do it for me.
One message reads “Weight does not dictate your health or your worth.” Well, part of that is true. Sure, being overweight doesn’t necessarily mean an individual is unhealthy, but condoning unhealthy lifestyle choices doesn’t seem to be the greatest message to be sending. Another message says “By choosing healthy over skinny, you are choosing self-love over self-judgement.” So, I guess the fact that I actually enjoy eating well and exercising must mean that I don’t love myself, according to that statement. Makes sense.
This is what gets to me about these sorts of campaigns: they attempt to make some people feel better about themselves while simultaneously belittling others simply because they’ve chosen to live healthy lives.
You’re not a bad person, or an ugly person, or an unworthy person just because you don’t fit somebody else’s standard of beauty. Do what you want to do. But at the same time, don’t tell me that my decision to be healthy somehow makes you feel badly about yourself.
I get that the message is to encourage people to feel good about themselves, but I suppose my own message is that it’s also okay to NOT feel good about yourself. If you don’t like the way you look, and you want to do something about it, then more power to you! Stop assuming that just because someone wants to better themselves that they are doing it for someone else. Chances are they’re not, and if they are, they should reevaluate their goals and priorities and realize that the only person that can truly make you happy and feel whole is you.
If you take one thing away from this column, let it be this: mind your own business and don’t tell other people how they should look.
Contact the author at journaleditor@wou.edu or on Twitter @journalEIC
