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Using Body-Shaming to Raise Awareness of Chronic Illness
Coping with a chronic illness is challenging, both physically and emotionally. Often the illness can change the way we look, making us feel self-conscious or embarrassed. This is not helped by people commenting on physical changes like weight gain or loss, or other body or facial changes.
However, there are people who have used their experience with body-shamers to raise awareness of their chronic illness, taking the opportunity to try and educate people about their disease. Erin Migdol writes for The Mighty about people living with various chronic illnesses and how they have used their own experience to help inspire others and to raise awareness of the effects of chronic illness.
Have you ever been body-shamed? Do you find Erin’s story and these celebrities’ stories inspiring?
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1 Reply
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This is such an important topic !! This is really difficult and has been really difficult for me recently. When I was a teenager and in my early 20s, I battled with an eating disorder and used eating as a distraction from the changes my body was going through physically. For me, it was a way to cope with the emotional toll of realizing I wasn’t able to physically do what I was supposed to. I lost a lot of weight in a short amount of time. Being sick and in the hospital and having times even during a week where I can’t eat as much as I would like to makes it hard for me to gain weight after I have lost it. People will comment asking if I’m okay and making assumptions about a past eating disorder and it’s hard for them to understand that some days I physically cannot eat as much because of my illness, it has nothing to do with starving myself to lose the weight. I wish more people would understand this. I actually wrote a column about this topic and the fluctuations of weight with a chronic illness too. https://pulmonaryhypertensionnews.com/2018/05/11/pulmonary-hypertension-weight-fluctations/
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