In May 2016, actor Gabourey Sidibe had weight loss surgery.
As Sidibe explained to People magazine, the decision to go through with the procedure was both difficult and personal.
Now, a year after the surgery, Sidibe is opening up about the reactions she’s gotten for her visibly smaller sizing.
While you might think that losing weight would earn her nothing but praise from the thin-obsessed world “were living in”, it turns out people’s reactions haven’t been too great.
As Sidibe explained to NPR, before the surgery, people liked to tell her that she needed to lose weight. Now that she’s had the surgery, people have felt compelled to warn her not to lose too much. It’s < em> literally a lose-lose.
No is important that her body looks like, she’s noticed, people seem they have a right to tell her what to do with it.
As the actor explained 😛 TAGEND
“It’s important because I don’t happen to have the kind of body that we typically understand on television and in films. I am plus-size, I have dark scalp, and I am 100% beautiful, but I get a lot of flak. ‘Oh, you should lose weight.’ And now that I have lost weight I lost weight for health reasons I get, ‘You appear good, but don’t lose too much weight because your face is starting to sink in.'”
Sidibe also noted the awkward remarks she’ll get from others celebrating her weight loss for the incorrect reasons 😛 TAGEND
“Literally someone mentioned, ‘Congratulations, I see you lost weight. Congratulations.’ And I say, ‘That’s a weird thing to praise me on because this is my body.'”
Sidibe’s experiences exemplify the impossible beauty criteria females face and why when it is necessary to weight you really should “mind your own body.”
All of us( but particularly females) are relentlessly pressured to adhere to ridiculou criteria when it comes to appearance. These expectations are ludicrous when it is necessary to defining “real” beauty, of course, but they’re also ridiculous when it is necessary to defining our health.
A person’s weight, generally speaking, truly doesn’t tell you all that much about their health, many experts say . And even if it could, what someone else does with their own bodies is their business and their business alone. A person’s weight, in and of itself, is not something to be praised for.
Every body looks differently, runs differently, and serves the person who inhabits it differently. And that’s important to recollect if we’re considering the sizing or shape of someone else or ourselves.
Sidibe gets it.
“This has been my body since I was 5-ish, you are familiar with? ” she told NPR. “It’s been a 30 -year thing of other people putting their own stuff on my body. But it’s mine, so I will police it, thank you.”
Read more here: http :// www.upworthy.com /~ ATAGEND
