The Skinny Girl Has Feelings Too
We must stop feeding into this cultural idea that there is only one standard of beauty for women
I almost drank the entire bottle of Apetamin when I was 10 or 11 because I was tired of people telling me I was skinny. I have a fast metabolism. They kept telling me I needed to eat more to gain some weight as if something was wrong with how I looked.
Apetamin is a weight gain vitamin syrup supplement that increases your appetite to help you gain weight. I went to my mom’s room and dug for the syrup. In the hope of speeding up weight gain, I drank more than the usual dosage. I was only a child. I slept for 16 straight hours. Every now and then I’d wake up drowsy and see my mom sitting by the bed, worried sick. She didn’t know what I’d done.
I still remember the self-esteem issues I had as a kid from those comments. It was a long time ago, but that memory came back to me when someone recently commented on my daughter’s weight.
“She is seven. Don’t you think she should be bigger?” he asked.
This isn’t the first time someone has commented on my daughter’s weight.
During dinner with some friends a while back, one of the women said to me we need to figure out how to put some weight on my daughter, as she shoved some food into her mouth.
I fear my daughter is going through what I went through when I was a child, and I hate it.
I’m naturally small. Isn’t it natural that my child is small?
In general, people would never approach a big girl and suggest that she lose weight, but they do not hesitate to suggest that a skinny girl add weight. While it’s considered rude to comment on a big person’s weight, most people enjoy pointing out how thin someone is.
Making comments about the weight of a big girl is as rude as making comments about the weight of a skinny girl.
Some people are born big. Others are born skinny. Some are born skinny and later become big, while others are big and later become small…
