Entertainment
Kim Kardashian’s obsession with her body is dangerous for us all-Emmie Harrison-West-Entertainment – Metro
This week, Kim left scores of fans outraged as she shared her body fat percentage on Instagram – celebrating the fact that she’d lost weight in the last year.
‘So a year ago, my body fat percentage was 25% and now it is 18.8%,’ she said on a video (Picture: Nathan Congleton/NBC via Getty Images)
If Kim Kardashian has done anything of note this year, it’s prove that she’s hardly a good role model.
I’m not doubting her ability to be a working parent, or be a supportive sister, daughter or colleague whatsoever – and I respect her for being open about leaving her turbulent marriage. But her obsessive views on weight loss are shameful. Dangerous, even.
This week, Kim left scores of fans outraged as she shared her body fat percentage on Instagram – celebrating the fact that she’d lost weight in the last year.
‘So a year ago, my body fat percentage was 25% and now it is 18.8%,’ she said on a video. ‘That would be considered athlete category,’ an expert can be heard saying in the background.
In the scan, for some ungodly reason, Kim had her bone density mass measured too, revealing them to be ‘stronger than 93-97% of people’.
This week, Kim left scores of fans outraged as she shared her body fat percentage on Instagram – celebrating the fact that she’d lost weight in the last year (Picture: Kim Kardashian / Instagram)
Firstly, who cares? If she wanted to do it for her own personal health or fitness journey, then I’m chill with it – whatever makes her happy. I use my Instagram solely for dog pics and spot squeezing videos, only.
But this bizarre oversharing of something so personal is not only weird, but extremely triggering for those who struggle with self-esteem and body-image issues – as well as eating disorders and body dysmorphia.
Why did it need to be shared with her 328million Instagram followers – many of which I imagine are young girls?
By doing this, Kim has wrongly proven that, to be in the top percentage of people in the entire world, you need to look like her, act like her, lose weight like her and even have bones like her, which is so utterly wrong.
But I’m so utterly thankful that I didn’t have a woman like Kim Kardashian that saturated every corner of the media with her toxic views on weight loss growing up
It’s especially worrying, as just a day before this, she posted an Instagram story about the tummy-tightening laser treatment she’d recently undergone, naming the clinic and sharing its details.
When I saw the more recent posts, thankfully which have not been received well, my heart dropped and I felt the bile rising. I thought back to being young and bullied for my weight.
I was called ‘Emmie the elephant’ from the tender age of seven – by both boys and girls my age – which left me on diets for as long as I can remember. I’ve tried them all: 800 calories a day, no sugar, starving myself, making myself vomit.
Kim’s obsession with her weight affects us all (Picture: Kim Kardashian/Instagram)
Though the concept of BMI has been proved to be inaccurate, misleading BS, I even still remember being called ‘overweight’ by my doctor from a young age.
There’s absolutely no doubt that fatphobic, cruel comments have affected my self-esteem; even today, at the age of 29, I still compare myself to women my age.
But I’m so utterly thankful that I didn’t have a woman like Kim Kardashian that saturated every corner of the media with her toxic views on weight loss growing up. I dread to think where my head would have been at today.
This is the woman who openly admitted that she lost 16lb to fit into an iconic Marilyn Monroe dress for this year’s Met Gala – after going on a three-week crash diet that sparked ‘really painful’ psoriatic arthritis over all her body and hands.
‘I would wear a sauna suit twice a day, run on the treadmill, completely cut out all sugar and all carbs, and just eat the cleanest veggies and protein,’ she admitted. ‘I didn’t starve myself, but I was so strict’.
This is the woman who openly admitted that she lost 16lb to fit into an iconic Marilyn Monroe dress for this year’s Met Gala – after going on a three-week crash diet (Picture: Dimitrios Kambouris/Getty Images/TNS)
This is the woman who publicly said in an interview with The New York Times that she’d ‘eat poop every single day’ if it made her look younger.
I would respect her more if she admitted: ‘Yeah, I’ve got these body hang-ups – and this is what works for me. Like it, or f**k off’. But she doesn’t – and hasn’t.
Instead, there’s a constant stream of unachievable and unbelievable goals set by her (perhaps unknowingly) for young women. She has set herself out to be the trophy that women are starving themselves to be like, to look like. She has single-handedly normalised, and even encouraged, this unhealthy, never-ending obsession with weight loss – and that, I cannot respect.
There’s no denying that the Kardashian face and body is unattainable – though many of the sisters deny ever having work done – young women will believe that, in order to achieve ‘perfection’, they need to do more. Work harder, lose weight, and keep losing it – before too long, we will see the devastating impacts of such a dangerous attitude.
In fact, Kim’s obsession with her weight affects us all. Fellow mothers see nothing but a flat, washboard stomach, free of stretchmarks, tiger stripes or sagging breasts on Kim’s Instagram page.
From high-profile women like her, we never see a hair or wrinkle out of place; not an ounce of cellulite, or a stray pubic hair – teaching us all that our natural is not normal, and is something to be fixed.
I want to see women, grown women, embrace their bodies – and be honest about their body hang-ups. Not feed us some unattainable rhetoric that your body is not good enough.
Kim, we’re tired of this obsession – it does nothing but hurt us.
Do you have a story you’d like to share? Get in touch by emailing jess.austin@metro.co.uk.
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