New Year: same problems

It brings me great sadness to report that there has been a great influx in shallow people expressing the terrible cliché of “New Year, New Me”, all over the walls of Facebook and along the timelines of Twitter, telling us of their plans to become ‘new’.

Every time I see this scrawled in places I genuinely lose hope because that is so over used and overrated that I actually exasperate and wonder what this world is coming to. Do these people ever question where the ‘new’ them will come from?

Well I will tell you it will come from someone else.

It will come from the front cover of a magazine and from a skinny, shiny and white plastic mannequin shone upon, by bright lights, on the shop floor; it will come from anywhere but within.

Oscar Wilde once said “Most people are other people. Their thoughts are someone else’s opinions, their lives a mimicry, their passions a quotation”.

I understand that there is irony in me inserting a quote from a great figure of literature, into my blog to express myself because it has come from someone else. But I’m not basing my life around these words whereas some people take things too literally and become too influenced by what they consume through TV, Tabloids and technology, all of which can be detrimental to the mind, body and soul.

I don’t have any resolutions for this year because in all honesty, for me, they’re a little silly.  However I do have a list of things that I’d like to achieve, and I’d like to share the most important thing on that list with you: BODY IMAGE

Everyone’s body is different, whether we like it or not or whether we can accept it or not, which I know many people can find great difficulty in doing. In 2014 the constant struggles with perceptions and acceptances of body image are something I’d like to help with and change. Of course I know you can’t force everyone to sing from the same songbook -  but you can try.

There’s no harm in trying – Kelis made milkshake and it was so good she began charging when it came to teaching those in her yard how to make it.

Like Kelis I’d love to teach but, thankfully, I won’t charge. I’d like to teach people to be a little less ignorant and a little more tolerable to the differences that are staring us in the face within our world… something I’d call a ‘First World Problem’.

Numero Uno - Just because you can’t see the world through the gap in your thighs doesn’t make you any less of a mammal…my dog has a thigh gap; does that make him attractive, pretty, popular? No… so why is it such a constant pressure for the human folk?

Well I can explain why now.

At work we keep ourselves entertained between calls with what I like to call ‘trashy mags’ because they’re simple and quick to read – perfect!

I’m an intelligent girl, these mushed up magazine aren’t my only source of reading, but I’m worried for those who seek solace in magazines because of the rubbish that they promote – Not one to name names Now, am I? Because if I were to, it’d be something New, OK!?

Headlines that scream “Stars in body crisis”, “skinny backlash” and “you need to eat” are giving people who read these magazines complexes. Their demographics range between 16- 34 and those who are younger in this demographic are more susceptible to being influenced by the absolute rubbish being promoted from these magazines, which every week seem to juxtapose the previous week creating a mental conflict for the young people of the day with little hope of finding the happy medium.

Just this week I saw a cover boasting “21 bikini bodies that will make you feel normal”… WHO are they to define what normal is? What even is normal?

On the front cover of this magazine is a woman who is a mother, to a toddler, and a size 12-14 (which is not the norm for the UK might I add), a photo of a slender Kate Moss with the caption “yikes” makes me feel far from what they may think normal is. It makes me feel worse than what I felt before… alongside a picture of a sinewy star I cannot waste words on to name.

It’s no secret that I’m not skinny, I embrace the fact that I’m fat and thankfully with regards to my body I don’t get hung up when I see these covers because I’m strong. However I worry for those who are a perfectly healthy size and are on a constant mission to drop a dress size from a 6 to a 4 and lose some weight off of their pre-pubescent looking bodies.

Things like this make me lose my mind as it seems as though the people who are doing this are being controlled by the tabloids and having their minds, or whatever’s left of them after their starvation diet, controlled. My main concern is that these magazines promote tiny, airbrushed images of celebrities as normal helping to increase the number of young women suffering from anorexia, and providing massive amounts of negativity towards fat folk.

Yes once a certain weight is reached it’s not healthy and it’s not glamorous, but it doesn’t make people less human and it doesn’t change the way people think and feel. However it does change the way that fat people are treated. Not everything has to be candy coated (pun intended), but it doesn’t have to be mean and harsh either.

If you call someone my size fat it doesn’t matter, but if you call someone the size of Kate Moss fat they lose their minds, they go insane, they don’t eat.

Tabloids and glossy gossips need to be censored to stop promoting different bodies to be bad.

Collectively bodies are both good and bad and if you rely on a magazine to tell you about yours I truly feel sorry for you. Which is why, this year, I want to help people become more accepting of what is real, and what is not.

At this present moment in time (1.36 am on 03/01/2014 to be precise) I’m not too sure of how I’m going to do this but where there’s a will there’s a way. It’s on my agenda for the year and for sure, I’m going to put a massive strike through it because I know I will achieve it.

I hope you all had a jolly Christmas, I know I did.