For a bodyshaming-free holiday season

Thanksgiving and Friendsgiving, Immaculate Conception, Christmas Eve and Saint Stephen's Day, then New Year's Eve and January 1st. The holidays have arrived, and for the next month and a half, there's no escape. For many people, gathering with family, returning to their Christmas home, and seeing everyone after months of work, school, or university is beautiful—the best time of the year, warm and positive. It's not hard to understand why: warm hugs are exchanged, gifts are chosen for others and unwrapped, and there's the enjoyment of grandma's or mom's cooking, tables filled with appetizers, first courses, mains, sides, and desserts. However, for some, this return to family life, seeing relatives not seen since the previous December, brings discomfort, awkward conversations, annoying comments about bodies, intrusive questions about our relationships, and our academic or professional success. In short, it forces us to share the table with people who delve into our business in a prying and sometimes unwittingly malicious manner, and whom we are happy to see only once a year.

Annoying Questions and Comments from Relatives

Have you ever had your old uncle or cousin returning specially from Switzerland (or something like that, you get the idea) say, "Oh, how you've slimmed down/gained weight/aged/plumped up" or similar? Or have your relatives, finally gathered around a table, commented on all the physical changes of their common acquaintances in front of everyone, leading you to obsessively think about your own physique? Unfortunately, this typical habit is nothing more than a form of body-shaming, often specifically fat-shaming. If done in front of food, it brings with it a layer of discomfort, loss of appetite, intrusion into private and perhaps painful habits, to be managed in front of family members without turning it into a drama, downplaying and smiling in the face of a push that, in reality, should be completely eradicated.

A Problem with Serious Consequences

Needless to say, body comments hurt. They hurt those who receive them directly, altering their relationship with food and their own body. They hurt those who hear them and internalize them, fearing to receive them themselves, protecting themselves by modifying their calorie intake, eating too much or too little. We don't say this, psychologists and therapists who deal with eating disorders do, emphasizing the importance of community support in the healing process, as seen in the Renfrew Center, for example. These comments, it's important to note, don't affect everyone in the same way. According to a study conducted in June 2021, this type of notation particularly affects people with a higher Body Mass Index (BMI). Moreover, according to the same study, these comments mainly impact during childhood and adolescence, influencing eating behavior for years with peaks of stress during those periods. The conclusion? The study emphasizes the need for multinational initiatives to support people who have these experiences and, we add, to raise awareness globally. Finally, we note that, according to Tiziana Corteccioni, psychologist and psychotherapist: "The human psyche is deeply shaped by its cultural environment. However, few studies have examined dynamics related to cultural influence in daily life, especially when it comes to shaping people's implicit attitudes. Body-shaming can cause feelings of inadequacy, anxiety, and depression, lack of self-esteem, and a sense of shame."

Changing the Way We Talk About Bodies in General

As if that weren't enough, where relatives' comments end, New Year's resolutions begin, and in no time, we find ourselves surrounded by people exclaiming about gaining weight, absolutely needing to join the gym or go on a diet, needing to do detox, juice cleansing, and who knows what other extreme practices. This way of talking about bodies as problems to be solved, and of two feasts as serious sins to be redeemed as soon as possible, is everyone's problem. Even if we're not the target of annoying comments, we should be very careful about how we talk about food, fat, and similar things around other people. We never know what we might touch and disturb, and it's better to be cautious, kind, and gentle with everyone, in general.

Starting to React and Setting the good example

In short, research, professionals, and statistical surveys are covering a kind of data gap, explaining things about body-shaming and the weight of certain comments that couldn't be scientifically measured, but that we could imagine. That it's linked to fat-shaming, for example. Or that it affects more in adolescence, a period when we are more susceptible to certain things. It would be absurd to continue on this line of assumptions born from the measurement of reality and add that often the targets are mostly girls but not only? We believe not. Being annoyed is right, reacting too, not only when we are the targets of a certain type of discourse, but also when we hear them around us. With the risk of spoiling the festive atmosphere but with the constructive possibility of acting as a deterrent for such comments or questions next year, and starting to set a good example personally.