All of my very skinny friends complain about how fat they are. My first reaction is, if weight is that important to you, and you think you're fat, then what do you think of me?
My second and more profound thought is, why is weight that important to you? I mean, I do understand why. It is all of the pressure that society puts on girls to be, above all else, thin. We see it every day. We see it in magazines and movies and billboards and everywhere we look--even my beloved books. Do you know, in books where the heroine is not expressly described as fat, the cover model is always so skinny she has bones poking out? I love books, I really do, but I'm so sick of it that I'm considering taking my stand so far as to not read books with skinny cover models unless the character is expressly described as thin! The assumption here is that if someone is not thin, they will moan and gripe about it so much and it will so terribly handicap her life that of course it would be mentioned in a book. But why? Why do people assume that weight should be such an integral part of who we are? There is so much more to everybody.
There are a million things we should be striving for rather than being thin. We should be striving to be smart, creative, compassionate, loving, diligent, kind--so many things. Beinga well-balanced, well-rounded individual is so much more important than being thin, but to look at the images we see every day in the media, to see the kind of celebrity-worship we partake in, you'd never guess it.
And who, furthermore, gets to decide that being thin is the desireable appearance? Because in American culture, that is so important, but in other cultures--many African or Latin American cultures, for example--that's not the ideal. I also read an article in the New York Times that said recently that higher rates of being so-called "overweight" in women in cultures where there's not the stigma attached to it that there is in Caucasian American (and other Western, and also I think many Asian) cultures, do not result in higher mortality rates. The study said that feeling fat is actually a lot worse for your health than actually being fat! Why? Because self-esteem is crucial, and somewhere along the line, somebody decided starving yourself was beautiful, and it stuck.
It used to bother me, not being skinny like my friends, because I equated skinny with beautiful. I equated skinny with successful. I equated skinny with being a worthwhile human being. It's none of those things. It is what it is: skinny, neither good nor bad. In some cultures, it's an ideal. In others, it's something to get away from. Everywhere, all it should be is simply skinny, with no stigma, positive or negative, attached to the word. Just, skinny.