So why do we place so much emphasis on our weight and why does it affect our self esteem as much as it does?

Weight and Our Self Esteem
In a world where the people around us are seemingly ‘perfect’, the pressure on us to be perfect too is often too much to handle. We see models, actors/actresses and celebrities, and we automatically think that we should look like them in order to be seen as normal. However, for many of us the dream of being a perfect size zero is just too unrealistic. This means that we are unlikely to ever reach the weight that we want to reach healthily, and that is when problems start to arise.

When you do not meet the mold that has been set for the perfect body, often you start to feel isolated. For people who are overweight, they often find it incredibly humiliating, as other people make jokes about them and tell them they are fat and ugly. It makes them feel as though there is something wrong with them and depression can take hold.

Feeling isolated and feeling as though you do not fit in can be extremely detrimental to your self esteem. After all, how can you possibly learn to love yourself for who you are when so many people around you are telling you how disgusting you are? This is particularly true with younger people. Although verbal abuse because of weight is damaging to both adults and children, with children it can often be worse. This is because they are at a stage in life where they are accepting who they are. So if other children are telling them that they are fat, ugly and not normal, it is likely to have a serious effect on their self-esteem.

However, it is not just the overweight who suffers from low self esteem. People who are underweight also face verbal abuse from others. It is slightly different for people who are underweight because they think that they are overweight. So they keep trying to lose weight and in many cases that can be deadly. They suffer from depression as they constantly feel that they are not good enough and it can be extremely hard to get their self esteem back up.

Overall problems with weight do cause serious issues for people with low self esteem. Whether you are overweight or underweight, they both affect your self esteem in roughly the same way.   
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