Last summer, the world watched as 21-year old Love Island star Molly Mae Hague received horrific abuse online for a series of photos of her on holiday in a swimsuit. Trolls encouraged her to ‘go to the gym, girl’, and ‘take some of the diet pills she markets’, calling her ‘lardy’ and ‘out of shape’. Similarly, Billie Eilish, at the age of 18, was recently ridiculed online for a viral paparazzi picture of her in a tank top. When Addison Rae, one of the biggest Tik Tok creators on the platform, was called ‘a fat whale’, she felt it necessary to go to Twitter and announce that she was choosing to ‘look at [the hate] in a positive light’, and was motivated to ‘become the healthiest, happiest version of herself’. 

 

What’s troubling about this kind of abuse isn’t just the nature of the abuse itself, but the response it often elicits from the victim thereof: ‘okay’, they think to themselves, ‘maybe I need to change. Maybe my health is at risk.’ Decades of framing body-shaming as ‘health-conscious’ has caused us to conflate unrealistic representations of the body, rooted in the patriarchy and perpetuated by things like social media, hollywood, and pornography, with actual, science-based health awareness. The result is that young people continue to damage their health for the sake of, well, better health (or at least perceived better health, and therefore relief from the relentless verbal attacks on their bodies), while the people carrying out these attacks are protected from any real criticism as they veil their hate in the notion of ‘concern’. 

 

If someone had said all this to me maybe two years ago, I probably would have thought it was far-fetched. ‘I obviously don’t agree with body-shaming’, I would have said, ‘but there is a correlation between health and weight.’ 

 

But around a year and a half ago, I learnt that I have Crohn’s disease. What that essentially means is that, due to inflammation of my entire digestive tract caused by an overactive immune system, my body doesn’t know how to digest food properly, or extract any nutrients from it. On bad days, my symptoms make eating extremely painful, from the minute I put the food in my ulcerated mouth, all throughout the process of its attempted digestion by my dysfunctional gut, to the minute I expel it either by throwing it back up my inflamed esophagus into the toilet or shooting it, liquified, out of my anus which, by this point, is seriously damaged.

 

Sexy, right? 

 

After reading that, it’s difficult to see why anyone would find me the most attractive when I’m in this state. But people who live with Crohn’s are very, very good at hiding what they live with on a daily basis, so all that people knew about my body for a long time was that it was skinny - really skinny. Because my symptoms have complicated my relationship with food, my appetite is pretty much consistently low, and I’ve struggled to maintain a healthy weight my entire life. Years before my diagnosis, my condition had already begun to affect my appearance -  constant acid reflux made my front teeth rot, the anemia made my complexion white and pasty. My vitamin and calcium deficiencies gave me dry, frizzy hair, and short brittle nails; 14 year old me didn’t feel like she fitted any other beauty standard in the book. But my size outweighed all of that, and I was consistently complimented on it growing up. It was enough for my girlfriends - all of them healthy, beautiful girls - to want to change themselves to look more like me. It was enough to attract a lot of male attention. It was enough to warrant unsolicited comments on my appearance from basically anybody, from church members and family friends to the middle aged M&S staff who lament, as I try on yet another dress too wide at the waist, that it ‘must be lovely to be so tiny’. 

 

Even before I knew I had Crohn’s, the ‘skinny’ compliment was uncomfortable for me to hear, and I never quite knew how to respond to it. But after being diagnosed, I’m told that I’m underweight because the very little food I do manage to eat isn’t actually being processed by my body, and now ‘skinny’ becomes synonymous with ‘sick’. Suddenly, ‘I wish I was as skinny as you’ essentially means ‘I would endure your chronic pain and discomfort if it meant I could be as skinny as you are’. As unfair as it was of me to take them this way, hearing these compliments wasn’t just uncomfortable anymore, it was painful. I resented the girls from which the compliments often came, who had the body I wanted - the round hips and full chest, the shiny hair and long nails. The guys I dated were overly concerned with my figure, always rejoicing in how ‘petite’ it was, and the connotations of that made me feel infantilised - in the worst possible way. Feeling alienated from the women in my family, all of whom had different bodies to me, I fought the temptation, every time one of them told me how in awe they were of my figure and how much they hated their own, to tell them that if they deprived themselves of nutritious food or made themselves vomit every time they ate, they could have it too.
 

These compliments only hurt because it seemed absurd to me that anyone would willingly put themselves through even a fraction of what my condition puts me through, just to be skinny. More and more, though, it began to dawn on me that of-course they do. Millions of young people simulate my disease, rotting their teeth with the acid they force up after every meal, disrupting their bodies’ nerve, muscle, and organ functions with laxative abuse, stripping themselves of healthy fats so that their skin can hug their skeleton. And who can blame them? How easy it is for me, someone who’s been skinny their whole life, to judge them.

 

I’m old enough now to know what the worst part about it all is: that while these young people impose symptoms of a chronic illness on themselves in order to conform to an arbitrary beauty standard, they’re still being fed the message that anything bigger than my size is not just unattractive, but unhealthy. Girls who have bodies which do exactly what they’re supposed to - who eat foods that nourish their bones and their organs, who exercise regularly, who get sufficient sleep, who don’t spend roughly a third of their life in the bathroom - are labelled horrifying things in the name of ‘health-consciousness’, and consequently sacrifice their actual good health for a thinner waist, hoping that will stop the abuse they face for how they look. But it doesn't.

 

Soon, guilt replaced my anger. Nobody making these comments about my appearance knew anything about my condition. They just saw the parts of my body I knew were in line with what was fashionable - my slender arms and legs, my thin jaw - and were mostly unaware of the parts I conveniently disguised, like the constantly bloated stomach (which, on a frame like mine, is particularly portrudent). Also, complaining about my figure to friends who were all too aware of the fact that I do absolutely nothing to maintain it mostly just made me sound like a prat. My weight actually meant that I was extremely privileged, and I was becoming aware of it: as much as I despised my own body, I was constantly being told by my friends and shown by the media that it was exactly what I, a young, adolescent girl, should be aspiring to. I had the body everybody wanted without having to ‘work’ for it. I could eat whatever I felt like without putting weight on, and I never exercised. 

 

And yet I never suffered unsolicited warnings about the state of my health. 

 

I’m growing into the same age as the three women I mentioned at the beginning of this article. In witnessing my own friends, all of them a natural, healthy size, experience this same kind of abuse more and more, I sometimes feel ashamed for feeling so uncomfortable in my skin; the comments I receive about my body have never moved me to ‘be a healthier, happier version of myself’, and yet I’m highly likely to be the unhealthiest of them all. Worse than this, the constant reinforcement of the message that my body type (or atleast a romanticised version of it) is the ideal makes me almost believe I should feel lucky to have the figure I have - like I should be grateful for my debilitating illness, because it makes me skinny. Like the symptoms I still experience, even on medication, should be a small price to pay for such a valuable commodity. 

 

I have been unhealthily thin my whole life, and I need people to start realising that the imposition upon young people of these impossible ‘beauty’ standards has never been about the preservation of their health. My diagnosis came so late for a variety of reasons, but certainly among them was the fact that I simply didn’t realise I was unhealthy. I knew I wasn’t eating particularly well, and I knew it probably wasn’t normal to regularly shit blood. I knew I was in a constant state of exhaustion, and that taking my body out of a chair and into the kitchen shouldn’t usually involve a 15 minute pep talk in which I desperately exhort myself to just please move. But all of that was sidelined, because for a long time, I looked like what we’re told ‘healthy’ is: not visibly underweight, but thin. If people had been as concerned with my health as they are with that of bigger girls, maybe I would have been diagnosed earlier. 

 

The thing is, my shape is going out of fashion now. For whatever new, arbitrary reason, we’ve gradually seen Kim Kardashian’s body surpass Paris Hilton’s over the years - wide hips and full breasts are now preferable over my, well, narrow hips and tiny breasts. I’m okay with it. But as much as this shift away from ultra-skinny is being hailed as a step towards inclusion, I fear for the young women who are growing up with this new silhouette being drummed into them as the ideal. The beauty standards young women feel pressured to live up to now are more impossible to attain than they ever have been; we must have ‘thick’ thighs, but ensure that our stomachs stay flat. We must have big boobs that don’t sag. Big lips are good, but double chins are bad. Our bodies must look picture perfect from every angle, in every lighting, at any moment. Even more concerning is the fact that the methods we're encouraged to use in order to conform to these standards are becoming more and more permanent - our bodies are becoming continually more visible, so that illusions created by clothing just aren’t enough anymore, and instead we’re beginning to physically cut, stretch, and pump ourselves into shape. 

 

While we may be moving away from overt fatphobia, and while we may be beginning to condemn explicit diet culture, we mustn’t mistake the newer, more deceptively damaging health and fitness movement for anything other than what it is: just another way to oppress people into believing they aren’t good enough, so that they pump their money into the corporations claiming to have the solutions to their non-existent issues. As long as this movement is still concerned with what bodies look like, rather than what they are able to do, it can’t be as health and fitness oriented as it claims to be; beauty standards are inherently unhealthy because ‘healthy’ looks different on everybody. 

 

I urge today’s young people to really think about decisions they’re making about their bodies. Your body is more than a product. As much as you are constantly being told this, its purpose isn’t to adjust to whatever shape and size is deemed the most marketable at any given point. Take it from somebody who, no matter how much weight she loses or gains, will never be truly healthy: if you can eat a normal, balanced meal and keep it down, your body is probably okay as it is. If you can run, jump, dance without the room spinning, without your joints giving way, your body is probably okay as it is. If you can make plans because you know you’ll be able to walk that day, and you know you won’t be tied to the bathroom, and you know you won't be hooked to a drip in a hospital bed, your body is probably okay as it is. It doesn’t need to change. Please - enjoy it while you can.