So, here is some really sad real talk. 81% of 10 year olds are afraid of being fat. It's the biggest fear. It's bigger than cancer or losing both of their parents. OK. In a survey of 9 and 10 year olds, 40% of them have tried to lose weight. It is almost half of our fourth and fifth graders who are dieting, folks. And then as adults, 91% of women are unhappy with their body, 91%. And interesting thing is, only 5% of women naturally have the body shape that we see in the media. So that leaves 95% of us, pretty much all of us unable to achieve that in real life. So, we have this failure-shame, failure-shame. It's just we are quite ugly.
So, what happens? What happens because of these statistics? What does that look like? It looks like a few things. How does this impact us? We see low self-esteem. We have bad days just because of our body. It's really too bad. We put our life on hold. We say, "I'm going to go gym shopping once I lose 10 pounds", or "I'm going to take that photo with my family after X, Y, Z", or "I'm going to start dating after fill in the blank". How many of us have done that? I have. A lot of us have. We put out lives on hold, we stunt it because of the way we feel about our bodies.
We see poor relationship skills. We feel unlovable and undeserving. Women with low self-esteem are more likely to stay in abusive relationships. We see employment losses. People with low self-esteem do make less than their confident counterparts. So, it affects us at work. We see the creation of or triggering of mental illness. Maybe something's dormant and it's triggered by social trauma, or maybe we developed symptoms of depression or anxiety or borderline personality disorder. We see dangerous eating disorders, also mental illness.
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Most 10-Year-Olds Are More Afraid Of Getting 'Fat' Than Getting Cancer (Original post)
