My 20-year-old daughter snaps at people when she hears them make disparaging remarks about other people’s bodies. Her reactions are equally strong when she hears people make fun of themselves.
“Stop body shaming yourself, Mom!” she’ll scold me when I joke about my clothes not fitting anymore, or how out of place I feel standing next to younger and thinner people.
“You look great!” she’ll tell me encouragingly.
This compassionate young woman, who likes wearing baggy jeans with tight crop tops — her stomach and cleavage exposed to the world — is admirably body-positive. I was never that confident or outspoken at her age. In fact, despite seeming lighthearted about the way I look, deep down I feel ashamed of my post-menopausal shape, and I mourn the loss of my younger and slimmer self.
For me, the weight piled on after a hurricane of hormonal changes slowed down my once-raging metabolism. My eating habits hadn’t changed — but my body’s biology did. And I’m still trying to figure out how to navigate all the changes.
Perhaps my shame originates with my own mother, age 90, who grew up in an era when women wore girdles and pointy bras under tightly-fitted dresses and considered their tiny waists to be their biggest asset. She’s proud that, thanks to a combination of lucky genes paired with a lifetime of restriction, she’s stayed thin — through menopause and beyond. She looks at me, in my middle-aged plumpness, with concern and pity, sometimes urging me to reconsider eating an extra helping at dinner.
At this, my daughter is quick to intervene. “Mom can eat whatever she wants!” she snaps in my defense.
Are my daughter’s strong anti-body-shaming beliefs unique to her, or emblematic of Gen Z? I turned to research to investigate. Well, most studies don't look as far back as 1933 (understandably), when my mother was born, to allow a true comparison, but the research I did find comparing more recent generations shows no difference between attitudes at all.
For example, one study I found compared women of Generation Y (Millennials) and Generation X (a mere 20-year difference, at most), and found that the generational groups “were more similar than different in weight-related cognitions." Another study, which surveyed more than 60,000 participants, looked at differences in weight bias over the past 10 years, and came to a similar conclusion: “weight-bias has remained relatively stable over the last decade.”
One sentence from this latter study, however, got my attention: “Small decreases in weight-based bias among younger birth cohorts of women,” the researchers wrote, “may reflect shifting societal norms about the acceptability of weight-based bias, although future work is needed to better understand this.”
Bingo! Maybe, slowly, people are becoming more accepting of a wider range of body types and less judgmental toward people with obesity.
The American Medical Association’s decision to change the classification of obesity from a condition to a disease in 2013 helped change people’s attitudes toward it. This paved the path for obesity to be viewed as complex, difficult to treat, and not controlled by an individual's choices.
The rise in GLP-1 drug usage is changing people’s attitudes about weight gain once more. Could these new pills and injections, which promise to turn off food noise and help people shed pounds more easily, lessen the shame that comes with weight bias? Or will they raise new issues and concerns that require additional research? Probably both.
What will future generations be up against when it comes to obesity treatment and discrimination? What will my daughter’s daughter think of her mom’s perspective toward her own body? What will that future granddaughter think about mine?
