she believes that we all have highlights and lowlights of our body that we could underline.“ I think women should enjoy being women and enjoy their curves in whatever size they are. If you have an attitude that you always want to hide away it doesn’ t help you in life”.
Although being always very proud of her 6-foot-tall figure, Anna was discovered as a plus sized model when she was 18, but it wasn’ t until she was 40 that she discovered the power that fitness has over her life.“ I was a lot bigger than what I am now, I lost quite a lot of weight. I’ ve been training a lot in the last 5 years and it changed the relationship with my body because I feel very able now. When I was unfit I didn’ t feel as well. Now, I am still a big woman but I am actually very strong”. For the designer, being fit has little to do with your size or weight.“ I strongly believe that we get accused in the industry of promoting obesity and telling people it’ s ok to be fat and unhealthy but I promote that you should be equal, you should have all the choices a skinny person has. You should have all the choices to look nice. I promote people to eat nutritious food, not junk food, to cook something for yourself and don’ t buy any of the packaged stuff, because there are a lot of thin people who are unhealthy too. It’ s more important to see how you eat and how you fuel your body and I think you can be happy at lots of different sizes”.
The fashion designer also believes that fat is seen as a blasphemy in our society since she thinks that“ a lot of people feel that people don’ t look after themselves when they are bigger or they don’ t value themselves enough or that they let themselves go. I think there is a lot of intolerance towards that. Yes, maybe it’ s not everybody’ s priority in life to constantly diet and constantly chase something unreasonable and naturally there are people with different body types. In either end of the [ body size ] spectrum it’ s not healthy, but naturally there a lot of people in different sizes”.
To Doctor Linda Bacon,“ fat isn’ t the problem, dieting is”. The health professor and researcher tries to demonstrate in her book Healthy At Every Size( HAES) how our perception of health has been mixed with misconceptions about our body size, through scientific studies and experiments.“ A society that rejects anyone whose body shape or size doesn’ t match an impossible ideal is the problem”. The HAES program that preceded the book was a government-funded academic study that followed two groups of women. It compared obese women on a typical diet with another group who followed the HAES program. The latest supported women in accepting their bodies, listening to their internal cues of hunger and appetite, and after two years they had improved their health significantly, from blood pressure to cholesterol and depression, among others. The women that just dieted also improved their health but returned to their starting point within a year. Dr Bacon wants to break the prejudice surrounding weight loss and body image, and in her book she goes to expose myths such as that“ anyone can lose weight if he or she tries to”. In fact,“ biology dictates that most people regain the weight they lose, even if they continue their diet and exercise program”. It may seem an orthodox approach, but the HAES book doesn’ t encourage people to give up, on the contrary, it encourages people to create a healthy environment for themselves and proves that health has much more to do with just the number on a scale. Rivkie Baum, sums up the momentum in fashion and body politics with the need for a change in conversation through media and society.“ There ´ s no doubt great strides have been made but we have so far to go. We need to be able to talk about health separately from body size and promote health across a range of sizes. We also need to bring mental health and physical health together in discussions and not treat them separately. Better media representation across all platforms of course will also contribute to a better image”.
Body politics are for sure a delicate subject. Even writing the word“ fat” can sometimes feel wrong, but if we give it a second thought, it only feels so because we are constantly surrounded by the negative connotation of its meaning. It is, in the end, an adjective to a physical characteristic, not a label to someone’ s personality, lifestyle or morals. If the social standards of body size offered a more diverse range of representation, then‘ perfection’ would be seen as a dirty word: an unobtainable goal and an illusory quest, made to blind us from what’ s underneath. /
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