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December 17, 2010 The Most Revolting Thing I’ve Ever Seen

Stumbling across Tumblr on any given day I’ll find multiple sources of fashion inspiration. However, today I found the most appalling display of human nature and misguided ideals I’ve ever seen on the internet.

Thinspiration (photos of skinny girls that other girls looking to lose weight refer to often to stay motivated) in the form of captioned photos telling girls not to eat for ‘another day’, feeding you lines (no pun intended) about how you are revolting if you are consuming food, photos of gorgeous healthy slim girls in groups with bullshit captions like “Your life would be this good – if you just didn’t eat”

Here are some of the things I found most disturbing:

 

Don’t get me wrong; I’ve seen plenty of websites dedicated to Thinspiration before – but nothing quite so callous and dishearting at the same time. I’m not sure if I feel more sympathetic or more angry towards the person who is publicising this blog.

But let’s face it, you can get skinny by not eating; if the kind of skinny that you want to be is gaunt and muscularly deficient, the kind of skinny that will fucking kill you. You will look flabby and your stomach will bloat out into what almost resembles a beer belly; you certainly won’t have flat defined abs. You’ll end up feeling awful, you have headaches, nausea, lack of concentration, and far worse – you could end up ruining your teeth and bones and begin an early onset to multiple other health issues as you age. If you had such a great deal of self control not to eat, why not turn that into self control to eat healthy and reduce your calorie intake to a safe level and get into the gym. Not only would you feel better; you’d look better. So many of the photos on this site are of Victoria’s Secret models or girls with proper definition in their bodies – girls that quite clearly work out and eat well to have their figures, which is why I find it so heavily disturbing. Most ‘thinspiration’ shows anorexic bodies/skeleton like frames, which at least is not misleading of how you would look if you give up eating. To give the hope that a girl would ever look like a Victoria’s Secret model from starving herself is beyond stupid.

On the other hand though, I saw that Jessica Biel rated #3 in the men’s Top 10 Celebrity Bikini Bodies of 2010 – which didn’t surprise me at all, but what I did find interesting though was the reasoning behind why they have chosen her, and I thought it was so good I had to share:

“A self-proclaimed gym buff, Jessica Biel has the kind of body that makes us never forget to renew our gym memberships, if only in hopes of running into a woman as toned as Jessica while blasting our pecs at the gym (or, you know, sipping protein-infused fruit smoothies at the gym bar while talking about blasting our pecs). Jessica, who recently climbed Mount Kilimanjaro, is proof that a woman who works hard for her body is way hotter than a woman who just says no to white flour. Besides, isn’t it more fun to be with a woman who can kick back with beer and hot dogs at a baseball game and who still look this good while doing it? That’s at least what we presume her boyfriend Justin Timberlake says”

AskMen.com

I have so much that I’d really like to broach in regards to this topic. The toned vs skeleton thin body type debate is age old and could go on forever. But I’ve decided to leave it at the fact that I think this kind of stuff is sad and awfully worrying. Teenage girls are easily the most impressionable kind and to put this sort of irrational thinking on the internet is disturbing. It’s one thing to have an eating disorder but when you are letting your eating disorder effect and influence other people – you really are causing a rippling effect. I understand people have the right to seek out whatever they like on the internet, and that alot of girls seek thinspiration but writing messages on them only further etches in problems that some of these girls possibly did not have to begin with.

Does anyone here disagree with me? Or have anything they want to add?

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