2. Negative Impact on Physical Health

Body shaming affected women’s physical health negatively. Social media promotes the idea of “ thinness is beauty” motivates women to lose weight in an unhealthy way. The Research done by Lei Zhang, Haihong Qian, and Hua Fu at the School of Public Health of Fudan University in 2018 suggests that the majority of participants lose weight in an unhealthy way and most of them are underweight. Even though these participants are underweight. However, they are not satisfied with their body shape. Some of the data from the study shows the needs of immediate actions to address the problems. For example, 26.64% of the participants were underweight, 63.87% of them were dissatisfied with their actual weight,  57.74% wanted to lose weight, and 30.55% showed a problematic thin ideal (Zhang et al. 2018). Because women are dissatisfied with their body shape it leads to the problem of eating disorders.

An article published in the Los Angeles Times by Jessica Meyers described the eating disorders in China. From the article, society’s pursuit of a certain type of beauty is one of the contributing factors of the eating disorder. There are statistics showing the increasing number of eating disorders. For example, “The Shanghai Mental Health Center has witnessed its greatest uptick in the past five years. The outpatient clinic last year received nearly 1,000 eating disorder-related visits.” (Meyers, 2016). This quote suggests the negative impacts of beauty stereotypes and mental health become a serious issue that needs to address.  If social media and society continue to practice body shaming, the number of people who have eating disorders will dramatically increase. Furthermore, the widespread practice of body shaming is affected by social media. 

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