Column: New Years for the plus-sized

By Catherine Engstrom-Hadley
Staff Writer

Year after year my New Year’s resolution list has had the same item at the top: “Lose weight!” For as long as I can remember, I have been fat. I look back now and wish I would have seen that all along I was perfectly healthy, but through the years, my resolution stayed the same. And I am not alone. In 2019, Statista ran a study of New Year’s resolutions, and over half of Americans wanted to lose weight.

At the beginning of the New Year I would go to the gym, meal-plan, and think to myself, “This year will be different.”

No American who lists losing weight as a resolution sets out to fail. But then comes the stress of midterms, along with some cheat meals, and going to the gym quickly starts to feel impossible. I would feel ashamed that I couldn’t stick to my goal. Then the self-pity and the negative feedback loop kicks in. Before long, we’re back to square one.

All around us, companies try to sell us thinness, from Weight Watchers to Nutrisystem; in 2019, the diet industry made more than $72 billion dollars. The “go big or go home!” mindset is constantly marketed to us. These companies ask you to change everything about yourself, forever, hoping that you will need their help until you are “cured” of your fatness.

Our society places a lot of guilt on plus-sized people. Being plus-sized can stem from a wide range of things, but that doesn’t stop others from passing judgement. We moralize every food choice made; chocolate equals bad and broccoli equals good. Pinterest has hundreds of pages for “guiltless” food. We make every food choice a moral dilemma, thus making it easy to be dismissive of our plus size friends and family.

To top off all that guilt, the diet industry bombards us with ads on social media that are all about “two weeks and 20 pounds lighter!” It’s not enough to simply lose weight, but we must lose it at a rapid pace.

Think about how many clothes, diets and drinks are marketed just so someone can avoid looking “fat.” From the snacks we eat to the spanx we wear, the avoidance of fat appearance is woven within consumerism. The diet industry and companies built around it cut all plus size people short by placing the emphasis of the hiding, masking and elimination of fat. Health, and being healthy, is not the goal of this industry, because if it was about health, the industry wouldn’t make all this money.

We need to reevaluate what these New Year’s Resolutions really mean for us, as a society. For myself, starting the year off with shame has created the opposite of my intentions. This year, I set a new goal: Be healthy and happy.

I am starting to repaint the idea of health for myself. I am not changing everything about myself, but instead I’m taking baby steps of self-love. No more crash diet, meals in a weird box, juice clenses or drinking gross powdered drinks. Just simple and slow change for the new decade. Will the weight come off with this newfound self-love? Maybe, maybe not—but more importantly, I accept myself either way.

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