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HT Brunch Christmas Special Cover Story: Shut up, skinny shamers!
HT Brunch’s slim, sexy Santa, actor Athiya Shetty, 29, gifts us a brand new perspective on body positivity!
Athiya Shetty stands in her building elevator, hoping she won’t run into any of her neighbours today. At 15 years old, an age when most teens are extremely conscious about the way they look, she’s hoping to escape the inevitable comments that pushy people feel the need to make. To her horror, the lift stops a few floors before her own and a kind but nosy aunty enters. All too soon she enquires, “Does your mom not feed you?! You’re too skinny. You should eat more!”
“If I had to tell my younger self something,” says Athiya, now 29 and this year’s HT Brunch Santa, “I would say, in 10 years it’s not going to be important. But maybe right now it is, so you have to go through it. It’ll just help you grow stronger.”
By ‘it’ Athiya means the constant body shaming, unsolicited comments and insecurities that arise when a person does not fit the perception of the ‘ideal body’ image that most people carry.
“You don’t know what battles people face. You don’t know what a child or a teenager goes through. So, commenting on weight, or appearance, or anything that can make a person lose confidence or spiral into anxiety—that’s just unfair. If you don’t have anything nice to say, just don’t say anything,” she states firmly.
Growing pains
Growing up, Athiya remained “too thin” because she also played a lot of sports.
“The most common phrase people would say to me was, ‘Oh my God, where did your food go?’ And constantly hearing that, it makes you conscious of your body,” she reveals. “I started eating more, just forced myself to eat, because I felt like that was the only thing that would help me put on weight.” Most people associate body shaming with those who are overweight. But people at the opposite end of the scale—people who seem underweight—are targeted just as much.
“A lot of people think that it’s okay to body shame you because you’re not fat. But not everybody is the same,” says Athiya. “Some people may be on the heavier side, and it takes them so much effort and time to lose weight. Then you have people like me, ectomorphs, who take a lot of time to put on muscle and weight, despite eating all the right things. It’s just a body type!”
Comfortable in your skinny
The core issue with skinny shaming is that it just isn’t recognised as shaming. In fact, in August 2016, HT Brunch had carried a story about skinny shaming with Zareen Khan on the cover, discussing the issue.
Athiya was just one film old at that time, but already firmly entrenched in the public eye. That was when she realised that fame meant people thought they now had a licence to talk about her and her body. “The moment you come into the public eye, you have so many people who have an opinion on how you look, or how you dress, and how you sit and stand and eat and walk, and everything. That’s when you become conscious,” she discloses.
“At the time I became an actor, I felt that people were starting to accept body positivity and plus-sizes,” she continues. “I felt that being thin wouldn’t be a problem.”
Unfortunately, she was soon proved wrong. “People would say, ‘You’re so thin, oh my God, you’re going to faint, you’ll fly away with the wind’. That used to bother me because, why was it an issue if I was healthy and eating well? It made me feel self-conscious for the longest time. Even now, I feel self-conscious when I’m wearing shorts or dresses because I have skinny legs, and really long limbs.”
As anyone who has a body that doesn’t conform to the ideal standard of beauty is can confirm, it is a long, tough journey to being comfortable in your own skin.
“I’m still on that journey. I’m not gonna lie, I’m not 100% there,” says Athiya. “I have days where I think, ‘Oh no, this makes me look too tall’, or ‘This makes me look too long and skinny’. But there are also some days where I feel confident. It takes many, many days—good days, bad days, days of feeling insecure about yourself, to finally accept that this is who you are.”
Ready, set, glow
Getting a weight-obsessed society to accept that being skinny-shamed is also body shaming is an uphill task.
“When I say it’s really hard for me to put on weight, they’ll just look at me like, ‘Stop showing off, that’s not a problem’. But it is!” Athiya exclaims.
She eats well, she works out, she is fit and healthy. But her body type seems to work against her every time.
“Even now, when someone comes up to me and says, ‘Oh my God, you’ve lost so much weight,’ I get really defensive, because it kind of takes you back, you know?” she asks. “When you’re trying so hard to look a certain way and someone comments negatively, you feel like you’ve gone a step backwards. And then you question yourself, ‘Have I really lost weight?’ It’s a spiral.”
Most of these comments seem to come from older people. “It’s like they have no filter,” she says. “Especially in the gym, so many people have come up to me and asked, ‘Why are you working out? You’re so skinny, you’ll just disappear.’”
But could the older generation just be a little misguided? After all, they weren’t taught any different. “For sure!” she agrees. “When somebody tells me ‘You’ve lost weight’, they might be saying it in a positive way like, ‘You’re looking so good’. But I’ll always take it in a negative way, because that’s the journey I’ve had with being skinny all my life. Maybe that’s something that I need to change.”
Christmas cheer
What about the younger generation? Girls and boys who are facing the very same things she did, who may be developing the same complexes and deep-rooted insecurities? “It’s very easy to say, ‘Ignore them and don’t take it seriously,’ but at that age you’re vulnerable and your friends mean the world to you,” says Athiya. “I’ve been 13, I’ve been 16, so I know you can’t ignore it. There are just certain things you have to go through. It’ll help you grow stronger. And actually, at the end of it, it’ll just make you believe that how you view yourself is the most important opinion.”
The question now on everyone’s mind is, what’s next?
“For the first time in my life I have no plan, and I love that. I’m kinda living in the moment. If I like something, whether it’s for OTT or a film, I’ll do it. I’m just going with the flow,” she says happily.
And here’s the most important question: does Athiya Shetty believe in Santa Claus?
“I do believe in Santa. Not gonna lie, I really do,” she states. “I believe in the tooth fairy, I believe in Santa, I believe in unicorns, I believe in all the good things. You have to have some magic to survive this world, so why not?”
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From HT Brunch, December 19, 2021
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