What are the consequences of not being a skinny girl? First, you’ll get body shamed by people around you.

Not long ago, my mom shamed me in a hospital lobby after she took me to the doctor for me being “too fat”. At first, no one was watching. But after my mom kept on raising her voice and I started weeping, people beside us turned their heads and fixed their eyes on us. My crying didn’t stop my mom, instead, she kept on calling me fat in a thousand ways. For example, she said I will never get a chance to perform on stage because no one likes to watch fat girls.

Second, just like my mom said, people might not want to see me perform because, to them, talent is unimportant compared to their own ideas of what beauty is in our society.

I have never been a skinny girl, and I have always been an outsider to the mainstream beauty standard since the day I was born. Most girls around me easily fit the beauty standard. Because I don’t fit in, I started to develop strong hate and anxiety towards myself. One sentence I said to myself all the time was: “I am such an embarrassment.”

Self-hate and self-abuse

I am sensitive to what others say, especially when I hear judgements about my body and appearance. Even if someone is “just joking,” I take their words personally and blame myself for not being good looking enough. Because I was so sensitive to what other people said, I developed anxiety and I started biting my fingernails and scratching my arms until they bled when I would gain as little as 0.1 kg.

In order to lose weight, I looked up K-pop stars’ diets and tried to follow them, and then developed my own weight loss strategy, which was unhealthy. I started not eating properly by skipping lots of meals and sometimes consumed nothing except for water throughout the day. I often felt dizzy because of hunger, but I didn’t care about anything other than losing weight. I did lose some weight at the beginning, but after I stopped eating so little my weight bounced back. I dropped into a dangerous dieting cycle with no exit. All I did was eat very little and still gain weight over and over again.

Stop telling me to lose weight

People have told me, “Oh you’ll be so much prettier after you lose weight. You should lose some weight and people will like you more.” Every time I hear this kind of “encouragement,” I smile and say nothing. However, I hate hearing people say this to me. I want to tell them to shut their mouths. But at the same time, I recently have begun questioning why people say this stuff to me. Why can’t I just be myself? Why should I force myself to become what others want me to become?

Everyone has their own body type and everyone is special. Just like no one will force Nicky Minaj to change herself to look like Ariana Grande, no one should tell me to lose weight. Besides, I’m healthy and strong. My heart and lungs function better than my skinny friends and I’m strong enough to carry all the heavy things without anyone’s help. This is my own body and no one besides me has the right to tell me to change how it looks.

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Many teenage girls hate their bodies and use dangerous methods to lose weight, even super skinny girls. The reason behind this is that society is too harsh about how a girl looks and has unrealistic beauty standards for girls. I like myself, and who cares about society’s beauty standards? I’m not skinny, but so what?