Jessica Ochoa

English 1120

Professor Kennia Lopez

10 December 2023

Positively Ashamed

When I was a young child, I was medically overweight. I ate a diet made up of mostly

mashed potatoes, bologna, and cereal with ice cream on top. My diet consisted of very few

vegetables. I was a picky eater as a child, and I grew up with overweight parents. I remember my

dad would always have a can of Coke in his hand and the smell of recess peanut butter cups on

his breath. Currently, my dad has been diagnosed with diverticulitis and diabetes. he is no longer

allowed to eat the same way, but he tries to. When I was a child, every time I would go to the

pediatrician, I was told I had gained weight. My mother would sit in the corner nodding her head

up and down at me while I got my semi-annual lecture from my doctor about how I needed to eat

more vegetables. My doctor sternly informed me that I would get a lot of scary life-threatening

health complications later in life if I did not.

Growing up as an overweight child, many adults felt the need to have what I liked to call

sit-down-talks with me about how I needed to eat healthily and lose weight. I was nutritionally

and physically unhealthy at the time, and they thought I did not know that. Due to my personal

experience growing up, I have concluded that adults are ashamed of overweight children. This is

because they know that young children are only ever seen as overweight as I was because their

parents let them get that way. As a child, you cannot supply your own food and if the adults that

raise you are nutritionally uneducated, you have no one to really teach you about nutrition.
 My parents, my dad especially, really liked to tell me I was fat, and that I was going to

get diabetes before I was 12. This was used as a fear tactic to make me want to lose weight, and

it worked because I was so scared of diabetes. My school friends, my relatives, my cousin who

was my age and normal weight, my friend's parents, teachers, everybody seemed to think it was

their responsibility to tell me I was ‘fat’ and only getting ‘fatter’. People do say some messed up

stuff to overweight people, the mindset behind this is that they are acting as a savior, and they

alone are helping someone to become healthy. Fat shaming is real, and people try to justify some

awful comments because they "just want to help", some people may say things like “I would

want someone to body shame me if I looked like that” in an attempt to justify an off-color

comment about an overweight person’s appearance.

My environment growing up left me as an unreasonably anxious adult. I experience so

much stress now when talking about anything surrounding my weight. This affects my personal

life and to this day my heart will spike if someone tells me something I am eating is too

unhealthy. I did develop disordered eating habits later in life that were directly related to the way

people treated me as an overweight child. When I did this people also had sit-down-talks with

me about how I was losing too much weight too fast, and that method of expression did not help

my weight-related anxieties. The concerns from people surrounding my weight had negative

impacts on my mental health, I believe it was because these people who wanted to help me did

not bother looking into the appropriate way to do so and it came out of them in angry

confrontations. Is my anxiety now worth the people’s comments then, is this right, does this

matter need to be exposed?

My exposé research focuses on exposing diet culture and body shaming. My research will

consist of literature reviews in traditional essay form. The interest of my paper is to bring
awareness to intentional and disguised body shaming. The method by which I will answer my

question is to conduct interviews to expose the matter more thoroughly. Another source I will be

using to expose body shaming in diet/fitness culture is academic accounts related to this subject.

Many people have body-shamed someone and may not have even known it. Diet culture has

normalized starvation idealization and positive body shaming to the point where many people

consider unhealthy behaviors such as those characterized by eating disorders to be healthy and

admirable.

Areas I wanted to address in my interviews were diet culture/body shaming, positive and

negative aspects, misbeliefs, misconceptions, personal experience, cause and effect, eating

disorders, diets, dieter mentality, and more. I interviewed two people with the same set of

questions. My first interviewee was an online acquaintance whom I had never reached out to

directly until given the opportunity to conduct this interview, we communicated via an Instagram

video call. She will remain unnamed, and I will refer to her as interviewee 1. Interviewee 1 is 23

years old and 98 pounds. I chose to interview this person due to their experiences as an

underweight adult.

Q: What is body shaming?

A: when someone like mentions something about someone’s body such as a double chin or

whatever and maybe makes fun of them or tells them something is wrong about that part of them.

Anything that is said to someone that makes them feel bad about a part of their physical… self.

Q: What is a reason a person may body shame someone?

A: Maybe they are just trying to be mean, or they are trying to make their friends laugh, like to

fit in with a group of people. Or maybe they are trying to be a good friend and, so like when

someone askes “do I look fat in this”, I don’t know.

Q: What does someone who body shames want to accomplish through body shaming?

A: Again, maybe they are just trying to be funny, though they are actually being hurtful. They

could also want to see someone be healthier and they think that making them feel bad, if they are

overweight in a concerning way, it could help them or something, that’s like pretty awful though.

But like it is kind of like an older generation thing too, like in the 80’s or whatever, wemon

would body shame each other to be friendly.

Q: What does this theoretical body shamer say they want to accomplish through body shaming

someone else?

A: Oh, like that one could be they are trying to inspire someone to be healthier, like if someone

has a weight related health issue, their friend could be body shaming them and say that they are

watching out for them.

Q: What do they actually accomplish?

A: I think in all of these situations, they just make someone feel bad about themselves. Like

when you feel bad about your body it is the worst thing because there is nothing you can do to

fix it, at least not immediately and its super shitty.

Q: Have you been body shamed? How have you someone been body shamed?

A: Yes, actually today l-o-l (she spelled out lol in conversation). I work at Dunkin and when I

was doing the drive through orders there was an old man in his car, he ordered 2 dozen
doughnuts and some ice-cream, I think he was trying to flirt with me, but he said, “they must not

have good employee discounts here ha-ha, because you obviously don’t eat doughnuts ha-ha am

I right?”.

Q: Did it do what the body shamer(s) wanted?

A: Maybe, he was a creepy old guy so maybe he just wanted to make someone feel

uncomfortable today.

Q: What did it do to you?

A: It made me feel really weird cause like I am obviously a small person but like what the fuck,

that’s just not something you say? I was all uncomfortable after, looking for my hoodie after that.

Q: Have you been to a public gym or in a gym, what was the Gym atmosphere?

A: I did go to a gym with a friend once and it was nice because I was with her and she told me

how to use everything. I felt fine because there was like only 10 people in there at the time, I

couldn’t do the same weights as her but yeah it was pretty cool. Then I was so sore for like a

week and I could barely walk, I never went again, but that was after.

Q: How did you eat when growing up?

A: I was a little kid I ate pretty normally growing up, I was a vegetarian for almost a year when I

was in middle school but I didn’t know what to eat an I got really skinny and sick so I had to

stop.

Q: Would you say that people with small bodies are assumed to be healthy and are shamed for

feeling bad about themselves?

A: Yes! I can’t say anything slightly negative about myself in front of my dad’s wife, even

sarcastically, she will always tell me to shut up because I am so skinny and pretty like a ‘model’.

Q: Would you say that people with large bodies are assumed to be unhealthy and are shamed for

feeling good about themselves?

A: Definitely, like I will be scrolling through Instagram and I see a photo of some plus size girl

looking really happy and pretty in a crop top or something and then ill look at the comments and

there’s like a whole argument in there with like 80 replies where one guy is saying something

like “cover up” or “why don’t people were cloths that fit them” whatever, and the other side is

people like defending her. It’s a whole lot of drama and I’m just like, wow this person just posted

a normal photo of themselves like where is the fire. I don’t even know, that could maybe say

more about how people act on the internet but damn, I know I would feel really bad if I was her

and I saw those comments.

Q: What causes someone to develop an eating disorder?

A: I think anything could cause someone to develop an eating disorder, It is really common

actually and normalized. It is definitely a mental illness, but it could be caused by anything like

someone calling you fat or maybe exposure to the wrong parts of the internet. Today

advertisements and stuff are much better about not making people feel bad that they don’t look

like a photoshopped model, but definitely there are advertisements that do that intentionally.

Q: Does your weight determine your value or how much respect people should treat you with?

A: Personally no, I think that you should be judged on your actions and words, but never how

you look, that I is so messed up but at the same time, I think in some situations it does like, it
shouldn’t, but scientifically there are more social advantages to being stereotypically pretty, like

on paper pretty.

Q: Does it affect your quality of life?

A: I would say yes, your weight affects many aspects of your life.
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