To Be Fat Or To Be Anorexic? That Is The Question

By Sango Bidani:

In this era of fitness conscious people, being fat or chubby is not considered desirable and is something to be looked down upon by the next generation as well as the society. What people tend to forget is that one needs to be comfortable in one’s own skin, and they don’t understand that going to the other extreme will damage and disfigure their body forever. Through this essay, I would like to show how being a bit fat and chubby might actually be better. The essay would discuss the attitude of the society and health hazards of being fat and contrast that with the dangers of going to the other extreme.

For quite a long time, there has been a lot of research done to justify the claim that being fat has a lot of dangers. Researchers have shown that those people who are fat have various diseases like heart ailments, diabetes etc. They have always highlighted how being fat is associated with the wrong lifestyle that people lead these days, which has its own merits. Society has always tended to look down upon people who are fat, saying that they are lazy, are good for nothing and the likes. Here I would like to give my own example, where because of a laser surgery to repair a tear in the retina of my eye, I was advised to not to do exercises which involved lifting weights. Now since I stopped doing those exercises that helped my body be fit, I put on some weight on my stomach and with the stressful life that students have these days, I used to eat a lot of junk food to beat the stress. No sooner had I put on a bit of weight on my stomach than I started to hear nasty comments being made regarding my body being too unusual and that I had developed a paunch, which was not the case. My relatives said that this is not healthy for me, and I should do something to control it. This illustrates that the society has a very negative opinion regarding those who are not exactly slim.

And while there is a lot of truth to what society and medical practitioners have to say about the disadvantages of being fat, what has stunned the society and medical fraternity is a dangerous swerve towards the other extreme, which is going either for six pack abs or size zero, which often leads to anorexia and other such diseases. People are so conscious about their figure that they will go to any lengths to get that perfect figure, even if it means pushing your body to the limit, which will someday give way. Increasingly, a lot of girls and boys don’t take the proper nutrition at the time when they are growing up, posing grave dangers to their body. The damage is so bad that it is almost irreparable. Till now, the society has not found a way of dealing with this other extreme that has come up recently. In fact they have been surprised by the new development.

There are two extremes that are present at the moment with which we treat our bodies. One is that we become fat and chubby and the other extreme is that we become size zero and anorexic. Clearly, none of these extremes do any good to the body and damage our personality. It is important to keep the right balance in anything and the same is applicable in this issue. However, if I were looking at the current phenomenon, I would rather prefer to be fatter than go to the other extreme. More than anything else, we must keep in mind that the maxim of a happy, successful and worthy personality is- to be comfortable in your own skin and to not get carried away by what the society says.