Please Stop Commenting On My Eating Habits On Instagram
One of the hazards of working at a website where you are near, surrounded by, and inevitably ingesting delicious food constantly is that everything I post is about food. (Also, the weight gain is real!) One of the hazards of using the internet at all considering those last two things (or, like, ever)? People feel the need to comment on all of it.
When I say "comment," I mean just about every time I post a meal I made that I'm proud of or take to Stories to tipsily walk people through a dinner I'm really enjoying, I get an onslaught of comments and DMs: "I don't know how you're not fat," "Where do you put all of it??" and, my personal fav, "If I ate like you, I'd be OBESE!"
Before I go any further (or you go ahead and stalk my feeds like the lil' creepers you are), I am a perfectly average weight for my height and build. I am able-bodied, mostly healthy, and, for the most part, happy with how I look. That said, I am constantly gaining weight, and I am a woman who grew up in a world where anything but a "perfect" body wasn't acceptable in many ways. That also said, you don't know about my relationship and history with food, nor is there any way to know about it from what I post on the webz.
So! Though a good chunk of the responses I get in this vein are coming from my mom's well-intentioned older friends (...that's a whole other essay), plenty of them are not. Plenty of them are from people who watched me painstakingly eat my way through mountains of food for work and already saw the comments from others on my weight. Plenty of them could've said "That looks sooooo good" or "Yum, I need that" or anything else that has no implications about the way I treat my body or how I look-but they didn't. Plenty of them are everywhere!
Seriously, I see this in almost every comment section involving a woman who posts in any sort of frequency about food. And while those with more followers (or, more noticeably, more "perfect" bodies) have people battling it out in the comments about why comments like that are gross, many still don't understand.
Allow me to explain! "If I ate like that, I'd be huuuge" is just a way of saying "wow, you eat a lot!" (which is not a bad thing). It's also kinda like asking "do you really eat that much?" (again-not a bad thing). On top of that, it's flat-out implying "good thing you aren't fat, huh" (which is too nonsensical to even get into right now). It's also just an invitation for whoever posted it to take a hard look at her decisions and ask herself-a person who is likely dealing with her own societally-imposed bullshit in some way, shape, or fraught form-"am I eating too much?"
...Like, do you see me up in your comments noting that if I spent as much money as you did on makeup, I'd be broke? Woof, dude. Wooooooof.
All this is to say, please think twice before you comment on people's intakes, even if it feels like it's just in good fun. Or if you really can't help yourself, at least check your damn grammar.
('You Might Also Like',)
