Stacey Solomon has penned an important letter about the negative effects of skinny-shaming.
The presenter said that she often receives comments from strangers telling her how “skinny” she is “in real life.”
Stacey said she found it strange that people were so willing to comment on a person’s weight to their face when they’re slim, but that they generally wouldn’t do so if a person was overweight.
In her column for The Sun, she wrote:
“Can you imagine? ‘You’re so fat in real life! I bet all you eat is bread! You need to lose more weight! You should eat less!’
“There’d be uproar! Yet we seem to be completely desensitised to skinny-shamming; it’s almost as if skinny = perfect.”
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Stacey pointed to her sister Jemma as an example of somebody whose body type is constantly referenced by people.
The singer said that her sister is three dress sizes smaller than her – making her quite slim – but that she was actually most happy with her weight when she was pregnant.
Stacey said that Jemma rarely gets any sympathy for not liking her slim build and that she’s often attacked for wishing that she could put on weight instead of lose it.
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“Some people are almost angry with Jemma when she’s at her lowest weight because they believe she’s magically gifted with the curse of being slim, no matter what she eats,” she said.
“They’re like, ‘How dare you be upset with that! What a shame, no matter what you eat you stay slim, poor you! Imagine having the opposite problem!’
“She’s then made to feel as though she’s selfish and ungrateful, with comments like: ‘You have no idea how lucky you are, people would die for a body like yours.’ So she often doesn’t talk about how she feels.”
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Stacey went on to say that Jemma often feels insecure about her weight and that when she looks in the mirror “all she sees is bones.”
“She hates posing for pictures because she says people think she’s anorexic and she finds it embarrassing. She always says to me, ‘I’ll never be sexy and curvy, I have no bum and no boobs, I look like a stick man.’
“After seeing the negative effect those comments have on my sister, I’ve had to really think about what I say to people. I used to think saying, ‘Wow you look slim’ or ‘Have you lost weight?’ was a compliment, when really it’s just perpetuating that skinny-shaming dialogue.”
That it is, girl. That it is.
