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Body image and its affects
Body image affecting self esteem
Body image and its affects
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“Fat Girl” by Megan Falley is one of my top ten poems. At the beginning of the poem, she starts off with a tone that seems very ashamed, but then with the line “Fat girl’s certain soul food taste better than being thin feels.” it changes into more of an unabashed tone. This poem means a lot to me, as I have always struggled with my body image and weight. When I was younger, I was constantly teased and called fat. This poem makes me feel better as she goes through all of her struggles being fat, but then she turns it around and shows that she is better than her struggle. One of the lines that shows this is “Fat girl don’t hate her body.” Hating my body is something that I’ve been working on. I've hated my body for as long as I can remember.
Staying Fat for Sarah Byrnes, written by Chris Crutcher, is about being an outcast, friendship, and standing up for what is right. The main character Eric, or Moby, whose best friend is Sarah Byrnes, find themselves going through a series of events of dark secrets, violence, betrayal, and more. In the book, these two best friends learn that friendship and sacrifice are vital in order to help find themselves.
Fat is not a Fairy Tale, written by Jane Yolen, is a lyric poem explaining how fairy tales have not accepted princesses of different sizes. Most don’t think that “fat” is something that people don’t have a problem being or some are even proud of the body that they have. They think that everyone is looking forward to that “ideal” body of being skinny, with a flat stomach, and a tiny waist. Jane Yolen used imagery and a bit of exaggeration throughout the poem. For example, when she referred to the princesses as “anorexic, wasp-waisted; flinging herself down the stairs.”
In “Cruelty, Civility, and Other Weighty Matters” by Ann Marie Paulin, she was trying to get across a very important message: skinny doesn’t mean happy. The main idea was about how our culture in America encourages obesity because of the food choices they offer, how expensive weight loss pills and exercise bikes is, and etc., yet the culture also is prejudice against these same fat people that they encourage. It’s a constant back and forth in America between what is convenient with the little time we have in between everything we have to do each day and working out to be skinny enough for everyone to not judge you. Ms. Paulin wrote this article for literally everyone, this article was for skinny people to show them like hey, you’re not all
The article “Fat and Happy: In Defense of Fat Acceptance” is written by Mary Ray Worley, a member of the National Association to Advance Fat Acceptance. She writes of her firsthand experience as a “fat person” in society. Throughout the article, Worley explains what it is like to be obese and describes the way society treats those who have a weight problem. She attacks the idea of dieting, criticizes medical professionals for displaying an obscured view of health risks, and defends the idea of exercising to feel good rather than exercising to lose weight. Unfortunately, her article seems to reflect only own opinions and emotions rather than actual facts and statistics.
She writes of the clothes that were sold there that were made for fat people and she thought they even looked stylish. She tells of a talent show where people get to try the lead role they did not get in high school as a result of the fact that they were not as beautiful as the skinny people. She writes that even though some researchers conclude that body size is genetically determined, they still say large individuals should try to lose weight, but it may be futile. She calls them out and says they cannot align their findings with what they believe personally.
“I wish to be the thinnest girl at school, or maybe the thinnest 11 year old on the entire planet.” (Lori Gottlieb) Lori is a fun, loving, and intelligent straight A student. In fact, she is so intelligent that even adults consider her to be an outcast. She grows up in Beverly Hills, California with her self-centered mother, distant father, careless brother, and best friend, Chrissy, whom is a parakeet. Through her self-conscious mother, maturing friends, and her friend’s mother’s obsession with dieting, she becomes more aware of her body and physical appearance. Something that once meant nothing to Lori now is her entire world. She started off by just skipping breakfast on her family vacation to Washington, D.C., soon to escalate to one meal a day, and eventually hardly anything other than a few glasses of water. Lori’s friends at school begin to compliment her weight loss and beg for her advice on how she did so. But as Lori once read in one of her many dieting books, her dieting skills are her “little secret”, and she intends on keeping it that way. It is said, “Women continue to follow the standards of the ideal thi...
One aspect of this poem that makes it effective is its structure. It is one continuous sentence, only separated by semi-colons and commas, and it does not follow the rules of line breaks or stanzas. The reader can imagine that a mother is listing the do’s and don’ts of being a woman in a never-ending manner. Repetition is also an important and effective part of this piece because not only does it create a rhythm in the composition aspect but significance in the purpose. Many new statements after the semi-colons begin with “this is how.” Some lines that impacted me were “this is how you smile to someone you don’t like too much; this is how you smile at someone you don’t like at all; this is how you smile to someone you like completely” (105) Women are taught to always be polite and smile, as a way to cover up any emotions or gestures that might suggest otherwise. Women are not praised for expressing how they truly feel because their voices are not important enough. This is one of the most powerful lines in the poem to me because I struggle with saying what I am feeling and thinking too much of what others will think of me if I decide to say
A person will speak or act negative about their body when they have a negative image of themselves. You can see low self-esteem in someone who has a negative body image. This happens in this film when Janis, Damien, and Cady give Regina these bars that Cady’s mom used to feed the children in Africa to help them gain weight. Regina was looking to loose weight so that she could fit perfectly into her dress for homecoming (she needed to be queen.) Once she started gaining weight she was uncomfortable in the only clothes that fit her and had to wear sweatpants. Her best friends started pointing it out and you could see her frustration with the weight gain. She was now uncomfortable in her own skin. This happens to women all the time. Especially women in high school and college, our bodies are constantly changing and that can be very tough on our personal body image thoughts. I know I have gained weight in the past year but have tried to keep a level head and just head to the gym more. I think that this class has shown that body image is only negative if you let other things influence you negatively. It’s all about our own personal thoughts and we need to make those
According to the Mayo Clinic, “Eating disorders are serious conditions related to persistent eating behaviors that negatively impact your health, emotions and ability to function in important areas of life.” In Michael Pollan’s article “Our National Eating Disorder” he argues that America as a whole has an eating disorder. His claim is supported with multiple pieces of evidence and I believe they are true. Looking deeper, Pollan’s arguments are that America’s eating habits negatively affect our health, emotions and, ability to function in important areas of life.
In the second stanza, Piercy describes the girl as healthy, intelligent, and strong (7-8). Yet these positive equalities alone, could not keep people from criticizing her, so the girl feels inferior. “She went to and fro apologizing,” which demonstrates her collapse of confidence with the people she is surrounded with, who kept putting her down (10). She gives in to the hurtful things people say about her: “Everyone [kept] seeing a fat nose on thick legs” (11). The girl thus lets people push her in the direction of society’s standard of beauty, instead of affirming her own unique beauty.
In the book " Staying Fat for Sarah Byrnes", Sarah's classmates do choose to bypass or ignore her scars. I believe the reason why people arnt very sympathetic or aknoledge the suffering of others is because they have their own scars whenther they are on the inside or out. I also think they ignore people who are suffering because they can be afaid and to scared to be invole, or in Mark Brittian's perspective, "that a person that has scars like Sarah Bynes and a person with few scars like Mark both have an equal life and that they arew both sacred." I think that Mark, Jody and Eric all have inward scars. Marks scar is that he feels a lot of pressure and is always trying to perform. Jody's scar is that she was forced by Mark to get an abortion
I do believe that the media really depicts what beauty is “supposed to look like,” which is being thin or muscular, but to some people being “fat,” as Smith would put it, is just as beautiful. Personally, I really do not like the word "fat," I prefer the term overweight or the politically correct term “people of size.” Throughout Smith’s article, she refers to “people of size” as “big,” “heavy,” or “fat” people (86-88). She uses all of these snarl words to bring a negative connotation and generalize that people view overweight people this way.
Orbach, Susie. “Fat as a Feminist Issue.” They Say I Say. Ed. Gerald Graff, Cathy Birkenstein, Russel Durst. New York. W.W. Norton, 2009. 200-205. Print.
As a woman of color who has always been a big girl, I started struggling with my body image when I reached my adolescence years. Growing up, I did not realize that my body was abnormal and unacceptable. I saw myself just like other peers and age group. My experience of body dissatisfaction first started within my own family. I got teased about my size by family members. My parents, especially my mother, reminded me constantly about how obese I was. Reaching a certain age, she started controlling my food intake and she made sure I ate no more than three times a day. With all those disciplinary actions from my mother and the pressure I felt from family, I started noticing of external standards of beauty and body image. In this lens, one can see that body image is influenced by many factors and my mother became a structure that carried out directives. This example demonstrates that feminine body is socially constructed and taught to us. When this ideal body image or feminine body gets inculcated in us at a young age, it becomes internalized discipline that enables one to distinguish herself from other
Women are bombarded by images of a thin-ideal body form that is extremely hard, if not impossible, to emulate. Comparing themselves to these women can lead to feelings of inadequacy, depression, and an overall low self-esteem. (Expand on, need a good opening paragraph to grab the reader’s attention)