Essay On Body Weight Stereotyping

It is not an unknown fact that in today’s society many adolescents are dissatisfied and ashamed of their own body size. Bombarded with social media’s ideal body type and lofty, unattainable standards on a daily bases young adults are always fighting an uphill battle for self-worth. They are expected to constantly jump through pop culture’s skintight size two hoops in an attempt to avoid the growing stigma of an “unsatisfactory body size”. With the constant negative stereotyping of heavier set individuals, society has instilled in young people an inherit dislike for larger body types causing prejudice solely based on the size of an individual’s clothes. It seems the harmful trend of low self-esteem and weight based prejudice is an unavoidable issue for our current society as a whole transcending the gap of both the genders, the races, and, as a study so recently showed, the ages. Published in the The Open Education Journal the article “Fat Kids Can’t Do Maths: Negative Body Weight Stereotyping and Associations with Academic Competence and Participation in School Activities Among Primary School Children” provides a detailed description about the process and findings of a study designed to investigate if children’s body image of others and themselves had an effect on the student’s academic confidence and/or participation in classroom

Then later urge the readers, such as teachers and health educators, to “promote children’s participation in academic activities and encourage wellbeing by implementing programs that increase acceptance of a wide range of healthy, and active body shapes.” (Chalker) With the well presented evidence and solid proof that negative stereotyping is a common trend in this group of children it is hard to not agree with their suggestion and support the need for more acceptance towards a wider range of body types; both fat and