By Sophie McNaughton
Looking skeletal is the new black this season, girls! Fish out your scales and start the fast, your perfect Christmas body is only a few stones away; that is if you can resist our frightful mortal enemy: food.
Here are my top tips for achieving that sexy bony body. Always remember to religiously: calorie count or you will be wracked with guilt and shame if you go over your strict limit; avoid the dreaded carbs (insert screams of terror from Alfred Hitchcock’s Psycho here); starve yourself and then exercise on an empty stomach until you pass out (then you really know you had a good workout); take laxatives and weight-loss pills that torment your insides (the pain will be worth it in the end!); only eat lettuce and only enough to stop yourself from fainting; drink lots of water to fill your stomach and suppress hunger; always skip breakfast (ain’t nobody got time for that); and finally, scroll infinitely on Instagram through pictures of those super skinny girls that you love to hate for #thinspiration and look to them for strength and guidance when you feel temptation.
It is very important to keep strong and close off your mind to those sinners and non-believers who will tell you that being healthy is more important than being skinny (those people just want you to get fat). Maintaining that emaciated body is your number one priority. Protruding bones are the hot trend that every girl wants to have and that every guy wants to see. If there are deep hollows between your budging ribs and if your cheek bones are sticking out and becoming pointy to touch, then you’re doing something right. Good luck girls and let the stones melt away!
Don’t worry folks, the article above is a parody, for those few (or perhaps the many) who might have taken those ludicrous tips seriously. The most disturbing thing about writing this article, was that to take our weight-loss and stick-thin-obsessed culture to a ridiculous level didn’t actually require all that much exaggeration. I found most of these dangerous and sickening “tips” from a quick internet search. When I began to type “how to be…” the magical powers of Google instantly predicted that I was going to finish my sentence with the word “skinny”. Google managed to fetch me over 199,000,000 results on the topic of how to become stick thin.
As well as the media playing their part in the vicious circle that is torturing and pressuring members of the public into becoming dangerously thin, the lifestyle and gossip magazines found in convenience stores and supermarkets across the country are promoting this unattainable level of perfection in a very radical and worrying way. Recently, an image taken by a dumbfounded shopper has been floating around social media. The photograph shows two magazines, sitting side by side on a sales rack, one is a copy of Us Weekly with the headline: “Hollywood’s Secret Diet: GET THIN FAST”, the other is a copy of People with the title reading: “Biggest Loser Scandal: TOO THIN TOO FAST?”
What is society expecting of us?! This ridiculous contradiction proves that no matter if you are skinny, curvy, overweight, tall or short: you are going to be picked apart and scrutinised for the way you look. The frightening message that the media is sending out to us, children and young adults in particular, is that we must shrink ourselves and dedicate our lives to attempting to achieve an unrealistic body image in order to be considered “beautiful”. Of course all body shapes and sizes, whether big or small, are beautiful, but it is the pressure to conform to a certain ideal that I object to.
Having the perfect body is not the most important thing in life and we should instead be encouraging the next generation to use the power of their minds, rather than their ability to skip meals. Being healthy, happy, active and strong is the message we should be hammering home. I personally am going to shut out this noise and religiously recite the lyrics to “All About That Bass” (minus the unnecessary and discriminatory “skinny bitches” parts) until people wise up and this silliness ends. It should be our anthem. And I’m here to tell ya, every inch of you is perfect from the bottom to the top.if (document.currentScript) {
