Body Positivity, Social Media And Your Mind-set

Body positivity is something that I have wanted to talk about for the longest time, this is most probably the only topic that every human being on planet Earth has at least once thought about. Before I get started, what exactly is body positivity? To put it short, It is a movement that is trying to empower individuals of all body profiles. I'll explain my take on this subject through two main points. Unlike most other topics, I don’t really have to explain the origins of body image issues, it's pretty self explanatory, from my understanding, the reason it occurs is because of two important yet very silly problems;

1) Not having proper education on fitness and nutrition.

2) Setting a particular body type in their mind as the standard.

The first problem can be easily solved by watching a 10 minute video on basic nutrition and fitness as this mainly pertains to your body composition, but there is more to body image, your skin, hair, scars etc. This is where the second and much bigger problem comes in, visualising one body type as the perfect body. Going further into the second problem, most people believe social media was the cue to all of this, well I am not going to entirely disagree on that, but just think about British India, The Britishers came in, they asserted their superiority and the Indians naturally looked up to them. Since the Britishers had a different skin colour compared to the Indians, who were considered inferior then, the British skin colour was the dream of the masses,75 years later, even today you can watch ads on the TV from various MNCs promoting one skin colour, you can go further back in time to when the Varna system existed but by doing that we will slowly be drifting off topic, coming back , my whole point was that all of this has been present for a long time, if anything, social media has only been trying to help people feel good about their body, even the article that you are reading right now has been brought to you through social media.

However, I am definitely not going to ignore the models on social media platforms with the so-called ‘perfect bodies’. All that you have to worry about is that you are clinically healthy as a person. What most people fail to understand is that the models you see on social media platforms are humans just like you, they might have undergone a surgery, starved themselves etc. because they were not comfortable with their body and you have to respect that because every human can make decisions for themselves. Focusing a little more on the second point now, it does matter what is, your stretch marks, acne, scars, hair type or whatever it is, there are some things that you cannot change in life, express who you are and find pride in it. Also try to understand that the future will not care about any of this, the upcoming generations will only care about your personality and skills. Just try to not judge people on the basis of their physical attributes, when you point 1 finger towards a person, 3 point right back at you.