I just watched an hour and a half long TV show on BBC called 'I Want to Change My Body', which follows 30 young people who have different things about their bodies that they want to change, from their weight (obviously, since that's usually the #1 complaint), to their boobs or noses or skin or receding hairlines. It basically validated what I've become more and more sure of in the past ten years: that nearly everyone has issues about something to do with his/her appearance, and a lot of us are tormented enough to take extreme measures (define extreme any way you like: surgery, juice fasts, obsessive makeup use) to try to 'fix' ourselves.
The show was fascinating, of course (I'm convinced that learning about people's deepest insecurities is far more voyeuristically stimulating than watching them have sex), but it was also really sad to watch. I feel like our society is getting more image-obsessive and more neurotic by the year – I'm certainly no exception, as much as I try (often futilely) to fight the indoctrination with logic. It's really distressing to see so many people at once admitting what so many of us feel all too often: that our bodies make us feel horrible/angry/sad/'rubbish', and that those feelings hold us back socially and even in our careers.
Anyway, I don't want to get into that because I have way too much to do this week and I can't afford to get depressed. The main reason I wanted to share this with you guys is something one of the overweight girls (who obviously was on the show because she was trying to lose weight, and who actually ended up having weight loss surgery) said: 'What happens if changing my body doesn't change the way I feel about myself?'
This is exactly what my book is about, and also exactly why shows like this make me so sad: because the body isn't usually the real problem. The body/face/hair can change, but if we don't work on the rot inside ourselves then those changes won't help. Sometimes the change in body does help change the inside (it has for me, albeit extremely slowly and with tons of extra energy), but often, as one of the men on the show said about getting a nose job, you 'just find something else to focus on'. I know my own body hatred has just moved around, from an overall disgust for my weight, to a tighter focus on my loose skin, to my general jiggliness with a special dislike for my ass, to my thick thighs, to... you name it, I've hated it. Except maybe my eyes...? Nope, too wide-set. See? Self-hatred is a roaming disease – slicing off one part of your body doesn't always mean you slice off the insecurities you once associated with that body part. They just move along down the line to the next part.
And that's precisely what seemed to happen with a lot of the people on the show who had plastic surgery (nose jobs, boob jobs, etc): they looked into the camera at the end of the program and talked about what they wanted to fix next (or, in one case, what he'd already had done since the nose job). Sigh. And the girl who had weight loss surgery? Well, she made the very astute point that it's up to her now to make the right choices, and she seems to be doing really well, but she still admitted that she's nowhere close to being happy with her body, and she still looks in the mirror and sees a fat girl.
I'm on the fence about shows like this... on the one hand they make me so sad – I hate seeing how we're destroying ourselves and further generations from the inside out. But on the other hand, I have to hope that giving this body image epidemic some attention and air time might help us all be more aware of how we treat each other, and maybe how we view ourselves. Knowing that the problem isn't really the way we look is a step, at least, to accepting our differences and focusing on more important things, like our health or the ways in which we relate to each other.
Or at least that's what I tell myself, to keep from sinking into despair at what we're doing to ourselves and each other...
The show was fascinating, of course (I'm convinced that learning about people's deepest insecurities is far more voyeuristically stimulating than watching them have sex), but it was also really sad to watch. I feel like our society is getting more image-obsessive and more neurotic by the year – I'm certainly no exception, as much as I try (often futilely) to fight the indoctrination with logic. It's really distressing to see so many people at once admitting what so many of us feel all too often: that our bodies make us feel horrible/angry/sad/'rubbish', and that those feelings hold us back socially and even in our careers.
Anyway, I don't want to get into that because I have way too much to do this week and I can't afford to get depressed. The main reason I wanted to share this with you guys is something one of the overweight girls (who obviously was on the show because she was trying to lose weight, and who actually ended up having weight loss surgery) said: 'What happens if changing my body doesn't change the way I feel about myself?'
This is exactly what my book is about, and also exactly why shows like this make me so sad: because the body isn't usually the real problem. The body/face/hair can change, but if we don't work on the rot inside ourselves then those changes won't help. Sometimes the change in body does help change the inside (it has for me, albeit extremely slowly and with tons of extra energy), but often, as one of the men on the show said about getting a nose job, you 'just find something else to focus on'. I know my own body hatred has just moved around, from an overall disgust for my weight, to a tighter focus on my loose skin, to my general jiggliness with a special dislike for my ass, to my thick thighs, to... you name it, I've hated it. Except maybe my eyes...? Nope, too wide-set. See? Self-hatred is a roaming disease – slicing off one part of your body doesn't always mean you slice off the insecurities you once associated with that body part. They just move along down the line to the next part.
And that's precisely what seemed to happen with a lot of the people on the show who had plastic surgery (nose jobs, boob jobs, etc): they looked into the camera at the end of the program and talked about what they wanted to fix next (or, in one case, what he'd already had done since the nose job). Sigh. And the girl who had weight loss surgery? Well, she made the very astute point that it's up to her now to make the right choices, and she seems to be doing really well, but she still admitted that she's nowhere close to being happy with her body, and she still looks in the mirror and sees a fat girl.
I'm on the fence about shows like this... on the one hand they make me so sad – I hate seeing how we're destroying ourselves and further generations from the inside out. But on the other hand, I have to hope that giving this body image epidemic some attention and air time might help us all be more aware of how we treat each other, and maybe how we view ourselves. Knowing that the problem isn't really the way we look is a step, at least, to accepting our differences and focusing on more important things, like our health or the ways in which we relate to each other.
Or at least that's what I tell myself, to keep from sinking into despair at what we're doing to ourselves and each other...
Comments
That's amazing! How's life after surgery? I hope you're doing well?
Thanks so much for reading the book – I hope you enjoyed it.
~A x