SOC558 Podcast Body Image and Social Media

Yolanda, a sociology student, discusses the impact of body image and social media on her relationship with food. She believes that educators should teach nutrition to students to prevent unhealthy habits. Yolanda shares her personal journey of valuing nutrition for her mental health and overcoming negative experiences. She highlights the flawed BMI system and challenges the notion that weight equals health. Yolanda emphasizes the importance of fat acceptance and the need for a shared responsibility in addressing the "obesity epidemic." She also mentions the dangers of extreme dieting and the importance of moderation. Yolanda suggests that food acceptance and regulation, as well as respect for diversity, should be taught to children. She believes that educating children about balancing foods can help them make healthier choices and influence their parents' eating habits. Yolanda concludes by explaining how she chose her podcast topic and thanks the listeners. Hi, I'm Yolanda and I am a third-year sociology student at Toronto Metropolitan University. I'm recording this podcast today because I am directly impacted by body, image, and social media and I want to speak to those who have an unhealthy relationship with food and ones who have the power to prevent this from happening. Since young people are most susceptible to what they see on social media and the fact that they are the top demographic for social media users, I believe that educators should put more effort to teach nutrition to students properly. With that being said, I am now going to provide why I started to value nutrition and at the beginning it was not for physical health but my mental health. As a Black woman, I often feel like a punching bag to society to a point where Black men started mocking us on TikTok as a trend and non-Black people joining in on the fun. Thing is, I already know I'm not going to be attracted to most people and I was okay with it until recently. In April, I was at the AGM near campus where a Black man approached me and said, loud in front of everyone, I tell every fat Black woman that they look like monkeys. I just laughed it off because I was raised to be the strong Black woman trope but I realized that my mother could not shield me from tough realities because that Black woman faced daily. Not to mention, because she was a single mother, I did not want to be a stereotype because I think I deserve love just as much as the next person. Based on how I see myself, I do believe some fact-folded comments like they just don't love themselves and the way I was eating my other parents was starting to affect my mental mental health. Since my mother did raise a strong Black woman, I do look back at my encounter at the AGM as motivation. Was it rude? A hundred percent but I started making but I started to choose a healthier lifestyle like walking five miles most days to eating fruits and vegetables. Also, I wish my weight loss was for myself but in a TED talk, Gabber Matt said that power is collaborative. I overcame my addiction to food with my addiction to power, power as in my power to get up in the morning and make healthier choices. Understanding my power helped me help my weight stay off because even if I slip up today, I know I can make better choices tomorrow. Also, when he talked about his patient fear of living, I feared of living with sickness such as diabetes because my mom died from diabetes and kidney failure. I took my power back from food because my dad is the only parent I have left and I want to be there for him. Even though I love junk food, my reward for eating healthy food is meeting my ideal weight along with knowing my dad can count on me. While I embarked on my weight loss journey, I was ignorant once I started to see progress to a point where I questioned how obesity is genetic. Looking back, I sounded ridiculous because the main reason I opted for unhealthy meals is because I grew up with a diabetic mother. The more I saw slim girls on social media, the more I was upset with my mother for filling the fridge with juice and not fruits and vegetables. Since I just shared my experience with body image and the impact social media has on me, I want to show the magnitude between body image and social media by examining chapter seven in the Oxford Handbook of Sociology of Body and Embodiment which is representations of fatness by experts and the media and how this shapes attitudes. Right off the bat, the chapter tells you what is considered obese. According to the body mass index BMI, a BMI over 25 is considered overweight. The system is quite flawed mainly because I am technically nine pounds overweight but because I am black, my muscle mass is 10 pounds more than the quote-unquote average person for my weight and height. Even though scales account for my muscle mass being high, somehow my BMI cannot get under 25. This is why I'm starting to understand that weight does not equal health. I found it interesting how the chapter explains how the media refers to the obesity epidemic and the war on obesity. Since I have first-hand experience with intersections of oppression, I can tell that it is not about being healthy. When I was looking into losing weight, I heard that you have to be in a calorie deficit meaning that you can eat mostly junk food but less and still lose weight. For the most part, being fat is a choice. However, society cannot claim fatness is a medical condition and public health crisis. This claim is problematic because they do not care what actually goes inside the body but only your outer appearance. The main reason I see fat acceptance as important is because medical professions and fatphobic people pretend to care about fat people. I do acknowledge that obesity does have health implications because essentially my mother died due to obesity. It took something traumatic for me to understand the importance of nutrition which is why I want people to learn about this sooner rather than later. I mentioned how my BMI is technically overweight despite how healthy I eat so I urge people to eat as healthy as possible and move around as much as possible. Do what is suitable for you. For example, when I started going to the gym, the stairmaster made me want to cry. I literally came off within two minutes. I almost let it get to me because I see on social media talking about how they've gone to stairmaster for 30 minutes yet I was out of breath within a minute. I tried almost every exercise equipment in the gym until I found what I liked and progressed from there. I would add 10 more minutes on the treadmill and would add more pounds while I was resistance training. In the article Development of Eating Behaviors Among Children and Adolescents by Laine Burch and Jennifer Fitcher explained the dangers of early dieting. Back to my fitness journey, I was overworking myself at the gym and depriving myself of sugar and as a sugar addict that hindered my process. Extreme dieting is why people end up gaining back twice as much weight as they lost. I noticed eating things I loved in moderation made me thinner because I would be less likely to binge on the weekends. I know not everyone's goal is to become thin which is why I believe this quote-unquote obese epidemic should be a shared responsibility consider fat-folded people are so bothered by it. They should try and help and this is where the education system comes in. There needs to be room for food acceptance. Here I will touch on the chapter suggested by my professor Jackie Greengrass called Raising a Healthy Eater in Your Community. This chapter begins by stating what is a good eater. Reading this, the list could be applied to those who undereat and overeat. The chapter goes on to say that being a good eater as a child should not be complicated. In summary, there should be no such thing as good and bad food. It mainly matters about how much you are eating which is why the author implemented three topics when teaching nutrition to children. Food acceptance, regulation of food intake, and respect for diversity. I feel like food acceptance and respect for diversity come hand in hand because there are cultures that eat high-calorie meals and they should not be demonized for it. However, you can regulate how much of these foods you're eating. If children are told not to eat sweets, when they get older they're going to eat them for themselves. Like me and other binge eaters, we eat in our rooms when no one's watching. So telling people what they can and cannot eat will make things worse. One limitation I've seen is that children do not know how to food regulate, meaning that is up to their parents. However, I noticed that parents feed their children junk food because children complain about eating healthy foods. So if teachers taught children about balancing foods, they can tell their parents what they want to eat. This could help a lot because parents want the best for their kids, but they do suffer from unhealthy eating habits of their own. I used ChatGBT to choose my topic because at first I thought it had to relate to the course. However, after listening to people's presentations and they chose topics that were not discussed in class, I searched into ChatGBT topics regarding body and embodiment and this was by far the most interesting and most relatable topic I could have chosen. Thank you for listening to my podcast, goodbye.