Food Shaming Can Ruin The Festive Season. Can We Please Cut It Out?
Our festive season is filled with lights, yummy sweets and snacks, rangolis, and family. It’s the time of the year when we just want to relax, celebrate, eat and enjoy. During this time we get a huge variety of sweets and snacks. Also mostly as Diwali gifts, we received sweets like besan ke laddoo, soan papdi, etc. More than the festival of lights, it becomes the festival of delicious food. But sadly most people can’t enjoy this occasion surrounded by delicacies because we’re too busy guilting ourselves. Or in some we are getting food shamed.
If you have heard lines like “Do you really want an extra poori?”, ” Should you be eating that many sweets?”, ” You will need to join a gym after Diwali” or ” Maybe you should eat more to fit in the dress,” then you have officially been food-shamed. But, the worst of all is when we food shame ourselves by adding guilt to every bite of food we have. We are all of different sizes and shapes and trying hard to fit into the ideal body shape and this manifests in this awful and ugly form.
I almost hate the festive season because it ends up turning into a season of criticism, fat-loss tips, food-shaming, judgement, and even sarcasm. Almost every year, I work hard to decide on my outfit for the festivals because well, I know people are going to look at and judge me but it doesn’t just stop there, they tell me what to eat, when to eat, how to eat, where to work out and even where I should get my diets from, to shed some kilos. Every year I have to hear statements like, “Your face is so cute, just don’t eat the sweets na, drop some weight, bahut pretty lagogey” or “Beta, khana mat khaa itna, thoda dhyaan rakh, shaadi kaise hogi?”. These literally leave me wondering if the world has been reduced to judging a person by their looks and weight to the point where we just cannot see beyond that. Sounds sad, huh?
Well, this, unfortunately, happens mostly with plus-sized people who are greeted with raised eyebrows whenever they pick up another helping of food. This food shaming leads them to think that they shouldn’t be eating and that maybe, they should focus on reducing their size instead. This desire of the people to reduce their size is then, commercialised by companies who sell supposedly healthy baked snacks, they are just a way for companies to loosen your pockets a little bit more without making a major improvement to our diet. This façade of healthy eating is also capitalised on by food delivery applications that offer amazing festive discounts and so-called healthier options.
However, the worst part is that we end up internalising the food shaming and this results in post-festive regret and guilt which drives us to diet pills, detox tablets, nutritionists for diet charts and even gyms where we receive major post-festive discounts, coincidence? You see, these decisions are not well thought out or planned but are impulse decisions to overcome the guilt that we feel just because we ate some amount of food during the festive season which nobody really deserves to feel, do they?
We really need to change this and what we need is to get past this practice of food-shaming people, and letting them eat whatever they want. The root cause of this literally lies in society’s inability to accept different body shapes. People need to stop expecting everyone to look like a model on the cover page of a magazine because they are also not real but an edited version of reality. We need people to accept people and love them as they are no matter their body size.
Also Read: How To Survive Through The Festive Days With A Dysfunctional Family?
Food is what we humans once used to fight for but the irony of today’s world is that food is becoming a major problem in many people’s life. This is because of those judgy eyes and the food shaming. We need to adopt an accepting attitude toward others and even ourselves. Don’t let anyone’s judgement stop you from eating all the sweets you want, this Diwali. Don’t be so hard on yourself. In this season of light, we should only spread positivity and happiness instead of toxic judgements. After all, we all deserve that, don’t we?
