How Body Shaming Affects Self-Esteem and Mental Health of Young Women?
Body shaming it’s about humiliating, mocking or criticizing an individual because of his/her physique and appearance. In other words, body shaming tears down your self-esteem, and leaves a painful, long-term effect on your mind, where you consider your body as imperfect when compared to unrealistic, air-brushed images on social media. In such situation, you forget that what actually matters in life is your inner peace, beauty of soul, and physical and mental health. These can only be accomplished with a balanced diet, healthy lifestyle and emotional stability. There are numerous nutritionists in Berlin, who can help you in keeping yourself fit both physically and mentally.
Role of Social Media in Promoting Body Shaming
Today, social media is playing a key role in manipulating the minds of young women; it’s changing the way they view their physique. Social media has cultivated the notion in their minds to set aside diet and healthy life style and strive only towards acquiring an appealing, slimmer, fairer and beautiful body in order to be titled as “ideal women”. False images of celebrities on social media that highlight their body, have become an acceptable standard of beauty. It is a classic example of building pressure on young minds.
Effects of Body Shaming on Mental Health
Since social media has promoted body shaming drastically in recent times, young women fail to accept their natural bodies and have been found to develop several eating disorders. This means body shaming does not stimulate but aggravate the thoughts that cause eating disorders. The most common eating disorder faced by young girls is binge eating that is referred as a disorder where an individual experiences episodes of eating food in large quantities with feelings of loss of control that may lead to purging later on. Hence, the individual who was previously leading a healthy lifestyle and was cautious about his diet remembers nothing but eating.
Another way in which body shaming affects mental health is that you start devaluing yourself
and fail to take care of yourself physically, emotionally and spiritually. Body shaming influences your feelings and behaviors and since you start disliking your body it becomes hard to feel nice about your whole self. All self-confidence and self-esteem is lost somewhere and you think that you are a failure. Your negative thinking allows you to focus on your shortcomings and weaknesses only, and you consider yourself inferior from others. According to the nutritionists in Berlin, this complex impacts on your eating habits, diet and takes you away from healthy lifestyle and it leads you to become a prey of depression and anxiety.
How to Fight Body Shaming?
How to deal with the effects of body shaming? Following are a few tips to help you fight the serious consequences of body shaming:
- Stop taking your appearance as a matter of life and death. Learn to love yourself. Start accepting and embracing every minor imperfection, as nobody is perfect.
- Eating well-balanced diet and exercising should be part of your routine as it refreshes your mind, releases stress, depression and grooms your lifestyle.
- Write a short motivating message on mirrors in your home that remind you to overcome negative thoughts about you.
- Surround yourself family and friends who recognize and appreciate your talent, uniqueness and love the way you are.
- Try filtering who you follow on social media. There are hash-tags, which exist across various platforms that are promoting and celebrating size and shape diversity and unedited images.
- Limit the time that you spend on social media so that your mind does not divert to body shaming content.
- You can seek help of famous psychologists and nutritionists in Berlin to settle self-esteem and body shaming issues, and attain guidance to healthy diet and lifestyle.
Conclusion
The bottom-line of this discussion is that you should realize that nobody can reach the ideal standards of beauty. It’s impossible to achieve the ‘perfect body,’ as it does not exist. Beauty is purely subjective and its concept is different for everyone. What is actually achievable and perfect is finding harmony between your everyday life and physical body. When you stop making comparisons with others you realize your strength, regain your self-esteem and confidence.