International Day Without Diets: against the obsession with the ideal weight

Today, May 6, and since 1992 the International Day Without Diets is celebrated, an initiative that was born in the United Kingdom by the hand of Mary Evans Young. Several were the triggers that led her to be the creator of this day: the viewing of a television program about surgical operations to people with being overweight, the news of an adolescent who decides to commit suicide having been teased about her weight in her peer group, and having suffered anorexia herself nervous.

Mary Evans then decides to work on a campaign called "Fat Woman Bites Back", which translated into Spanish means "Fat women return the bite."

Over time, more countries have joined this initiative, which focuses attention on key points related to the pressure we women receive on body image, thereby denouncing the creation of beauty canons that are far from reality.

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Why does the International Day Without Diets appear?

Some of the objectives that this campaign aims to pursue are the following:

• Celebrate the natural diversity of the body.
• Promote good self-esteem in all people regardless of their body.
• Revalue a positive body image in all bodies.
• Develop healthy eating guidelines that are not based on restrictive diets that favor the appearance of eating disorders.
• Reject, as a society, cultural values ​​that favor hatred of one's own body.

These central objectives are intended to remember this day are interrelated with other factors that directly or indirectly attack the creation of a positive image towards one's own body, as well as towards that of others people. Some examples are invitations to follow the so-called "miracle diets", in which some of them recommend food restriction.

• You may be interested: "The 16 types of discrimination (and their causes)"

Acceptance of one's own body

The use of food supplements that replace food intakes, the abuse of laxatives and diuretics to achieve a feeling of "emptiness"... The obsession with reaching an "ideal weight" without taking into account the natural fluctuations of the same and the own body constitution. The custom of performing the "bikini operation" that anticipates on the one hand that to show the body must be certain form, as well as that you have to make changes to it so that it can be displayed without complex.

These are some of the different guidelines and attempts to market products that highlight the "need" to achieve a weight at which project different personal and social expectations, which on many occasions, are not finally satisfied with the modification of the body or a part of the same.

It is therefore necessary to highlight the importance of preventive measures aimed at stop factors that promote body dissatisfaction.

A positive attitude towards one's own body

From the family, it is advisable to favor positive attitudes both towards one's own body and towards that of others, and promote a healthy lifestyle around food so that it, among others, does not become a stressful agent around which personal and interpersonal.

From the rest of socializing and community agents: Show rejection of fat-phobic attitudes, do not allow discrimination around the workplace from school and the workplace. physical, promote a critical attitude towards cultural mandates that threaten bodily diversity and gender mandates related to corporeality, eliminate use of images far from reality that exalt extreme thinness, and in the manufacture of clothing to support body diversity with its different shapes, sizes and heights.

These are some of the many measures that can promote the creation, development and maintenance of good body self-esteem.