As someone who has been recovering from being underweight for over decade, I think we should talk about how, I've been posting my body on the Internet for a few years now, and for most of that time I was, for my body, still underweight. Over this past year, I've reached the healthiest weight I've been in twenty years.
Not to mention physically the fittest my body has ever been, and this year, strangers have started body shaming me on the internet. And I think we should have a conversation about how underweight bodies are perceived as "normal" and healthy weights are actively stigmatized.
Because this mindset is literally destroying lives.
And listen, because I feel like I have to actually spell this out: No bodies should be stigmatized.
There is a huge degree of variance among normal human weights. Being thin does not automatically signal dysfunction, just like being fat does not automatically signal dysfunction.
But.
I think it's really important to notice the way extreme thinness is glorified even when it is objectively at the expense of someone's health, as it was for mine. And the way people perceived as women in particular, are expected to maintain extreme thinness under the guise of normalcy.
But it's not actually normal. Extreme thinness is one tail of the bell curve, it's literally not "normal" and should not be imposed as the standard.
