“Trapped in a beauty ghetto is how I felt.”—Chuck Palahniuk
Lately, combing through social networking sites, especially now after the New Year, has been an exercise in both patience and strength—patience to get through all the status updates about weight reduction, and strength to prevent myself from inspecting my own body and tearing myself down when I find myself lacking.
Now, it is highly commendable if a girl wants to start hitting the gym because she has made a goal for herself to lose a couple of pounds, or to tone her body, or to just be in better shape in general. However, there is a very fine line between health and obsession, and I find that many collegiettes toe the line, either consciously or subconsciously, when it comes to the way her body looks. This difference lies in the ways in which weight reduction consumes her life—how much time she expends adding and subtracting calories from her meals and her gym time, which words she uses to describe her body or that of other women she sees, how long she spends in front of a mirror turning this way and that with an almost analytical look in her eye.
It’s not to say that doing these things means that you have a problem, because let’s be real here. We’re all guilty, myself included, of sometimes disliking our body and wishing we are something that we are not, but the key word is sometimes. And this problem of body image and body hate is one that is so prevalent in our world; our eyes are overloaded with images of size 0 models and actresses, so our brains become wired by the media to equate thinness with either beauty or anorexia. This stark contrast presents a confusing issue for many women because either a woman is too thin or not thin enough; slender women are either lauded as the epitome of beauty or told that they have an eating disorder, and average-sized women are torn apart for having perfectly healthy and normal amounts of body fat content. Many women are thus trapped inside this cage of body and beauty, constantly measuring their waistlines as a reflection of their worth, and no one wins. We’re all kind of just stuck in all these representations of what our body should be, and we forget not only what actually is (which is your body) but also what and who is important (which is you).
It is impossible to completely pull yourself out of this mire created by the media and all its perceptions and characteristics it ascribes on your body, because we are surrounded by it, no matter where we go. However, it is possible to pull back and move away from this “beauty ghetto,” reaching a state of mind where you can be happy with the way you look and how you feel about your appearance. It’s all about mind over matter, and there is even scientific backing for this. It’s called the set-point theory, and to put it in the simplest terms possible: if you leave your body alone, your metabolism will adjust itself to maintain a weight that is comfortable for you. This theory essentially takes away external factors that many think affect weight gain/loss—calorie counting, excessive gym time, dieting—which decrease a person’s self-esteem, and focuses on your body chemistry and hormones alone. I’m not suggesting that you completely let yourself go and eat anything you want, but what I’m saying is that you should trust in your body and in yourself, believing that you look the way you need to and you are the right weight for you and you alone.