What is the connection between beauty and health?
"Obesity" and "overweight" they sound like a diagnosis for us - actually, from a medical point of view, this is a diagnosis (recall, overweight is considered at a BMI of 25, and obesity occurs at 30). Obesity is included in the International Classification of Diseases, which is used by Russia. In 2013, the American Medical Association also voted to recognize obesity as a disease. The decision of the AMA did not please everyone - including not all doctors. David Katz, head of Yale University Center for Preventive Research, wrote on his LinkedIn: “Our ability to get fat is part of normal physiology. Obesity begins with the accumulation of body fat, which in turn begins with the conversion of excess calories into an energy reserve. It’s what a healthy body with excess calories should do is store them for a rainy day. "
A disease is a disruption to the body. From the point of view of physiology, to gain weight when the body consumes fewer calories than it consumes is a natural process. An increased percentage of body fat may increase the risk of certain diseases, but not necessarily provoke them. That is, completeness in itself is not a disease in the usual sense of the word. Moreover, the obesity paradox is associated with fullness: according to research, people with a high BMI have a greater chance of fully recovering from, for example, a heart attack, than people with a “normal” body weight.
We are accustomed to believe that beauty and health are connected - which means that fullness cannot be attractive, because it cannot be healthy. In fact, the question of whether fullness is healthy is very controversial, and beauty and health are not at all connected in the way we think. At the beginning of the last century, evolutionary scientists Westermark and Ellis began to think about how ideas of attractiveness are connected with health. They considered that we consider some external signs of health to be beautiful, because we are subconsciously looking for the most "quality" partner - including the one with whom healthy children will turn out. Recent studies claim that, in evaluating appearance, we take into account only fertility, and not overall health. So, a girl with a healthy digestive tract does not seem more attractive to us than a girl with gastritis.
Back in the 70s, researchers noticed that socially approved qualities are more often attributed to physically attractive people.
This mechanism works in the opposite direction: more beautiful people seem to us more healthy. In psychology, this phenomenon is called a stereotype of physical attractiveness, which, in fact, is a cognitive distortion. We are afraid of rats or insects, because our brain, existing for longer than pasteurization and antiseptics, is used to perceive them as carriers of dangerous infections. Similarly, we think that people suitable for our and social standards of beauty are healthier, because we associate beauty in general with everything good. Back in the 70s, researchers Dion and Miller noticed that socially approved qualities are more often attributed to physically attractive people, and the qualities themselves depend on geography and the stage of development of society, but the mentioned regularity persists. For example, in the Western culture, beautiful people are perceived as strong and independent, and in the Eastern - as caring for others and causing confidence.
According to a study on the Public Library of Science portal, the more different figures we see, the easier it will be for us to accept them: if we met women of different sizes in the media, we would treat them — and ourselves — more friendly and calmer. The concepts of "beauty" and "beautiful figure" are sociocultural: in times when rich people had the opportunity to eat a lot and not engage in physical labor, fullness was a sign of wealth and status. In modern society, in order to play sports and eat right, you need to have a certain amount of money, so thinness becomes a sign of prosperity, along with well-groomed clothes or fashionable clothes. Completeness is thus branded not only from the point of view of beauty: fat people are more often considered lazy, sloppy, weakly characteristic; doctors are more likely to look for the cause of all his problems in the weight of such a patient, and to fat workers are more demanding than thin. Stereotypes that a woman must be young, thin, fashionable, well-groomed, also act. The requirements for the female figure are much higher than for the male, and much greater social pressure is put on fat women than on men with the same build.
Many experts - for example, such as Dan Ornish, about whom we have already written, believe that the stigmatization of fullness does not make people lose weight, but leads to depression, eating disorders and even suicide. Constant unsuccessful attempts to lose weight with social pressure lead to acquired helplessness and stress. Now, it seems, society is gradually becoming more and more tolerant of completeness: plus-size models, websites and even stores with normal things of large sizes appear. But the division into "normal" and "plus" implies that large sizes are not normal, plus-size models are often thinner than their audience - just like ordinary models are thinner than their own. Girls from the ASOS Curve campaigns do not wear ASOS Curve clothing - it starts at size 14 on the American scale, and models wear at most 10 (or even 8).
We do not get tired of repeating that the appearance of a man - whether men, women - is his own business, a question of his or her comfort and self-expression. The system in which a photo of a fat girl is banned on Instagram and full actresses play mostly comic roles makes a huge number of people miserable. If our goal is to feel more comfortable in our own body and, on the whole, to become happier, the habit of a variety of beauty is the feature that can and should be brought up in yourself.