Is Skinny Shaming As Bad As Fat Shaming? | Blogtober Day 8

This is where Growing Kale becomes a little controversial.

Before I begin, let’s firstly address that I’m no way near saying one is worse than the other, this is a constant debate and discussion that I wanted to address as some of you may be surprised to know that one of my biggest insecurities growing up, was how skinny I am.

People rarely consider being skinny as a bad thing. Neither did I, for a little while. In fact, a lot of people growing up complimented me on my figure, saying how they’d kill to be as skinny as I. That was nice, of course, but I’d also get a large amount of comments of people saying I look sick. I can’t explain how patronising some people could be.

Putting their finger around my wrist to emphasise how skinny my arms are. My aunties, telling me at every event about how much weight I’ve lost. People constantly asking if I’m okay, or if I’m ill. Growing up, young girls have problems, insecurities and self doubts anyway in life, and even though these people had no idea what they were doing, it was eating up and eating me up until I started to become extremely self conscious about my weight.

In secondary school, I was underweight and that was super easy to tell. It didn’t help that the baggy school uniform and blazer really didn’t compliment my physique at all. I weighed myself – a lot and I would eat and eat and eat, but to no avail. It was actually incredibly mentally exhausting. I wanted to gain weight, I had to gain weight, if I did then I’d finally get those comments completely out of my head, but I’ve never ever been in control of my weight. It’s not easy to just change it.

This next bit is extremely difficult to talk about, but here I go anyway…

There was someone in my life who I really, really cared about and I really cared about what they thought about me. It was someone I was interested in and someone who was interested me, and I can tell from his instagram feed alone that he was into much bigger girls. He put a thought into my brain that big equals sexy and if I wanted to be seen as sexy, I had to gain weight. Bigger boobs, bigger booty, bigger me. It wasn’t easy. I ate everything I could, I went to the gym and really tried my hardest for months – but big isn’t me. I physically can’t drastically make that change to my body.

I’m sitting here, a 20 year old young adult and I still wish I could gain weight. Nowadays, it’s not for anyone else, but just a healthy self achievement that I’m trying to work on.

I know there a millions of skinny girls out there going through the same frustration as I and it really sucks when we got laughed at and ridiculed when we speak out about it. No way do I feel we’ve been oppressed and shat upon as much as big girls. However, I really wish big girls had our backs more. Instead of getting angry the minute we complain about being skinny, maybe listen and be open to the fact that we’re suffering to.

So, to answer the question, do I think skinny shaming is as bad as fat shaming?

My answer is no. It’s not as bad.

However, it does fucking suck.