Perfectly imperfect

There is a growing movement of body positivity among teens but has toxicity crept in? Shaming or making rude comments about someone’s size is wrong and unacceptable but does that mean we should not encourage children to be healthy?

My earliest memory of a sensual connection with my body is from when I was about 13 years old. I had started my period when I was about 10 and my genetics ensured that by the time I was 13, I had the fully developed body of a young woman. It was uncomfortable at some level because I looked older than my age and my tall frame adorned with sensuous curves attracted a lot of unwelcome attention. But, in private, I revelled in this revolution my body was experiencing. I would sometimes take off all my clothes, wrap myself in only a silken dupatta and spend hours looking at my reflection in the mirror.

Looking back, I cherish those afternoon trysts with myself as a young girl’s first steps in a lifelong dance with sensuality and self-acceptance. But, even at that time, in the early nineties, I realise that social and cultural attitudes to beauty did affect my own relationship with my teenage body. As I write this piece on today’s teenagers and their relationship with their bodies, I cannot help but wonder how I would have responded or felt about my body if I was constantly inundated with information and striking visuals that are all about achieving the ‘next level’ of perfection, performance, and beauty.

The body as a heliogram

In an age that celebrates itself in the third person, where our sense of who we are comes not from our relationship with ourselves and the world but from how the world perceives us, the stress to appear likeable is intense. Compounded by the natural teenage urge to find commonality, acceptance and love from peer groups, the desire to be perceived as something or someone that can ‘trend’ or garner followers puts intense pressure on the physicality of our experience, often leading to body image issues. If I could feel inadequate as a teenager when I started putting on weight in college where there were no shiny Instagram models staring back at me from phone screens a thousand times a day, I can only imagine what the teenagers of today feel as they are flooded with images of idealised beauty everywhere.

The body has become a giant heliogram that you cannot escape from. It floats outside of us in airbrushed perfection and we bump into it everywhere. It is so big that it is inside our very heads, growing bigger by the second. Add to this giant phenomenon the teenage experience of self-actualisation through sex and sexuality. It is common for teenage boys and girls to develop a troubled relationship with food when there’s a sense of inadequacy or worthlessness.

Season of self-acceptance

Like almost all things in nature, excessive pressure anywhere will lead to a rupture and release somewhere else. It is no wonder then that this obsession with high standards of physical perfection has birthed a radical movement celebrating the body as a place of resistance — resistance practised as complete self-acceptance and love through movements like body positivity and inclusivity.

As someone who has been plus size for half her life, the movement played out through secret Instagram profiles where you can post boudoir pictures anonymously and be loved for your curves and stretch marks or watch body-positive influencers who belly dance, jiggle, run, wear bikinis and encourage you to embrace yourself as you are, has been liberating. I find clothes my size (finally!) online, I see real-life examples of big-bodied/skinny/dark/thin/tall/short people living regular lives, falling in love, finding partners, wearing whatever they like and I feel included, celebrated and free.

But somewhere between the two extremes of the obsession with ‘perfection’ and the call for social approval and celebration of all kinds of beauty, there is a common thread. In both cases, where individuals experience themselves as either inadequate because they don’t meet certain criteria of physical beauty or celebrate themselves through the body, the lens through which they’re viewing themselves remains external. It is almost as if instead of following our inner compass of growth through relationships, connections, work and play, we are all following an external GPS, which makes us constantly disassociate. As if no matter what you’re doing, you’re looking at your own self from outside a shop window. And in the age of technology that forces you to work, socialise, and run businesses from the other side of screens, there is no escaping this desire to look like something.

This is not to say that there is a right or wrong way of experiencing ourselves or that dissociating is always unhealthy. In most cases, it is a way for the body to cope with intense sensory overload. We step out of our bodies so we can somehow manage. At the same time, it feels like we are constantly inside a mirror where we are both the observer and the observed and there is something about this reality that scares me, especially when I think of children and teenagers.

Fat shaming vs Wokism

At a recent event with parents for my book, one parent expressed concern about the fact that she can no longer encourage her children or push for healthy eating habits and playing sports or managing body weight because she gets accused of ‘fat shaming’ them when she does that. And I have to admit that it is something I struggle with too.

As someone who has been overweight for a long time and who has a bigger-than-usual 15-year-old, I see value in body positivity and inclusion drives that urge young people to ‘celebrate the body you’re in’ and ‘beauty comes in all sizes’. I see value in offering acceptance and love to youngsters for who they are irrespective of their body weight or type. When it began a decade or so ago, body positivity was a welcome breath of fresh air that saved many young people from the cruelty of anorexia and size zero fashion of the 80s and 90s. In fact, it is because of the excessive focus on ‘thinness’ as a mark of beauty that fat-positive communities first emerged because we were losing young girls and women to crazy diet fads.

But what we couldn’t predict then was the massive change in eating habits, the food industry that became infiltrated with sugar-heavy junk available at cheaper rates than healthy food and the erosion of micro-cultures due to globalisation. These micro-cultures thrived on diverse food groups that ensured better health and practised a more ‘what do we need to eat for our climate and body types’ approach rather than the mass McDonaldisation that we see today. All of this together has snowballed into an obesity epidemic where the average human being is heavier by 6-7 kilos than what we used to be two decades ago and heart disease, diabetes and endocrine issues have reached epidemic levels. Add to this the stress of modern life and the collective trauma that we faced during and post Covid and our children really have very little chance of health as it was generally understood in the past.

The above combined with the extremes the body-positive movement has reached where people are shamed for losing weight to improve their health and the idea of ‘healthy at any size’ is pushed at us despite the overwhelming scientific facts presented by the medical community has made it very hard for parents to ask their children to be mindful about what they eat and how much they exercise.

One of the painful side effects of Wokism is the instant shaming and attack people receive when they suggest something that might hurt your feelings a little but comes from a place of deep care and concern or simple facts. I am not healthy at 5 ft 6 inches and 94 kgs no matter what the body-positive movement says. I may look good and embrace myself as I am but I don’t think that means I wouldn’t want to lose weight to improve my health.

Care, but don’t get ‘cancelled’

I have not met a single overweight person who wouldn’t want to be lighter for health reasons if they could. And that is irrespective of how they feel about themselves. One can embrace one’s curves and be confident in a big body but it doesn’t always mean one doesn’t want to be healthier. And to want that is not being ‘fat phobic.’ Shaming, name calling, slandering or making rude comments about someone’s size is wrong and unacceptable but does that mean we should not try to be healthy and not encourage our kids to be healthy? I really don’t think that it is possible to be fit and pain-free in any size, even if it’s 120 kg plus. It physically doesn’t make sense as the extra weight puts excess pressure on our joints, our internal organs, our blood pressure regulation and so many other aspects of our biology.

So what do parents do in a scenario where it is impossible to express care without the danger of being ‘cancelled’ and called ‘fat phobic’?

The first thing that comes to mind is the invitation to step back from a causal way of looking at weight. Weight gain is not as simple as you eat more food, more calories and you get fat.

Our bodies are very complex and to diminish them to cause and effect is not fair. Emotions, trauma, abuse or traumatic injury chronic pain or illness, mental health, emotional lacks and insecurities all affect our relationship with food and our bodies. The way our bodies process food, store fat, and manage hormones is dependent on a million factors like our age, gender, time of the month, pain levels, emotional state, stress levels etc. There are no easy answers like if you exercise you’ll be healthy or weight is determined by the number of calories we eat. Especially in the post and continuing pandemic where exercise has been shown to cause sudden heart failures even in children and chronic post-viral illnesses are on the rise, there is no way everyone can exercise the same way without risk of burnout or worse.

When I had to undergo spine surgery early last year, that period coincided with horrific bullying in my son’s school as well as ongoing emotional issues with his father (my ex-husband). All this while I was immobile and in pain for a good six months, not able to step up for my child in the way he needed. I was his primary caretaker and suddenly I was no longer there for him. He gained a lot of weight in those few months, his sleep was affected, we had to pull him out of school and he was often plagued by nightmares and anxiety. And his food habits went for a toss. Now, who is to say that only food is to blame when it comes to his weight gain? Food is one of the things we use to feel better, to assuage a sense of emptiness in difficult times. That coupled with poor sleep, excessive stress, dis-regulated nervous systems and jacked adrenals all escalate into body weight changing madly, especially in teenage. When I reflect back on my sudden weight gain in college, I see a similar pattern emerging. I was in a new city, lonely, the food in my PG was horrible which meant I turned to junk and I suddenly found myself in an unhealthy relationship with no one to turn to for guidance and everything crashed badly. Our bodies are like webs where everything connects to everything else and to pull one thread will not unravel the whole web but it will cause vibrations in all directions the web is sprawled in. That is what I would like parents to pay attention to.

Our bodies are also like octopuses where if you cut off one limb, another sprouts in its place. We are regenerative and magical in the way we can change and influence who we are, how we feel and what we look like by changing small things in our everyday lives. You know how a chiropractor pulls and pushes one limb and the way we walk changes or how when we add some nutrients in the soil while gardening and the quality of our plants change? That is how subtle and powerful changes in health can be. When I saw how limited I was and how lonely my son had become, I nudged him towards team sports. He chose football first and then gave it up. He chose the gym next and it’s been six months since. I am not happy that he is part of the toxic gym culture that again pushes young people to ascribe to certain body types but I see how it has given him a sense of community where he has more male figures to look up to and how he is more mindful of what he eats.

As I recovered slowly, I had to lean in more, show up more for him even if that meant I cook for him (which he loves) and become strict about spending on junk to only one junk meal allowed per week with the rest of the week being home food. Another ingredient to the soil has been music and learning the guitar with us looking for more options that don’t pressure him to study in a toxic school environment. Yet another has been finding ways to communicate with his father and ease that relationship. Can I say I have a foolproof formula? No. By all modern standards, I am failing as a parent with my kid on a break year from school at fifteen and invested in music and working out. But can I say my son is healthier than before? Yes. Health is more than weight. It is a balancing act and sometimes learning to balance takes years. I am still learning.

So if you’re a worried parent to a teenager who is rapidly gaining weight, try not to harp on food alone. Pay attention to what is lacking in the child’s life and attempt to add that in creative ways. Maybe you will have to add some things and take away others. Maybe you will have to watch how you speak to your child and pay attention to more love and less criticism. Maybe you will have to be hard sometimes and soft sometimes. You might even find that increasing the number of hugs you give or how you talk to your kid not just to correct but to be present causes them to blossom in new ways. Who knows what will work, but we need to keep trying, we need to look at what limb is missing and what ingredient will work. Perhaps in this dancing our kids will learn to embrace their bodies and also to honour them well, to not look at themselves from outside mirrors. No doubt in this dancing, we will fall and get up but never in the same way twice. Like my teachers once told me, sometimes the way to health is to look at life sideways.

The author is a life coach, trauma and relationship counsellor, speaker and sexuality educator. Her book ‘Unparenting - Sharing Awkward Truths With Curious Kids’ was recently published by Penguin.