What is your body made of? Your body is made of skin tissues, bones, blood, fat, and more. You need nutrition to maintain your body. Your body needs to be healthy or else you might not be able to normally survive LIFE. So, everybody knows that your body is important. Without bodies, we cannot live a physical life and can’t conduct what we want to do. Body can express what we want to express. Without it, we cannot feel or live a fully satisfying life.
In the past, just getting much food to maintain one’s life was difficult. Resources were limited and aristocrats got all the advantages of good health, just because they were born in that class. But as society develops, foods, clothes, houses and furthermore, health conditions are much more improved compared to ancient days. The reason for this is first, public hygiene made much progress. Classes have vanished. There are plenty of foods. People’s average nutrition status is higher than ever. Statistics related to starvation dropped. So, our global world had reached some point of level that most of us, except for the minority of underprivileged, don’t feel a sense of crisis whether we couldn’t eat today or tomorrow.
Then, what are bodies for in human society nowadays? They became accessories, merchandise, and arts. Bodybuilding, exercises have been a trend. Diets are now crucial for modernized people. Instead of worrying about gaining enough nutrition, people’s main concerns changed to what kind of nutrition that we could gain. So, what our bodies are made of physically is now default. Our bodies are much more than that. Now, our bodies are made of images.
The standard of our “ideal” body image always changes. When there were eras when thin bodies were worshiped, there were eras when chubbiness was the symbol of wealth. These body images are subjective, variable and depend on the perspective that one has. Even though it’s an intuitive factor, people are mesmerized by its fantasy. Young people are enduring harsh diets to maintain low kilograms. When celebrities seem to gain weight, related keywords about why celebrities gained weight pop up on the search engine. Most of them lead to idleness or being lazy, or lack of self-control. But those frames are not only for celebrities. That image also becomes contagious and spreads across the public as common sense; “We should look like them”. Evaluations are made to the public and they are classified under the same criteria. If you look at someone who looks overweighed and doesn’t have much muscle in stale standards, you might have once thought “I’m better than him/her”, “I shouldn’t reach him/her stage”. When evaluations are made, comparisons are made. People worship what they think it’s idle and sell that image, but at the same time, that image relegates people. Cramming bodies into one frame and blaming them who are not inside that frame is cruel.
But images are illusions. We can prove that by listing all those beauty standards erected by humankind for thousands of years. What you think it as idle, will be inevitably outdated someday. Bodies are just aggregation of cells. The body exists for you to live, not to show off. Of course, you can get some satisfaction from matching that idle image. But it’s all for that and not for more. The body is made for you, not for the people around you. So, your body is made of you. Be careful not to lose it by others. Refill your self-esteem and love your full body.