Time to stop judging people!

Sam Smith has posted a picture of himself, shirtless, to reclaim his body. He wrote:

In the past if I have ever done a photo shoot with so much as a t-shirt on, I have starved myself for weeks in advance and then picked and prodded at every picture and then normally taken the picture down. Yesterday I decided to fight the fuck back. Reclaim my body and stop trying to change this chest and these hips and these curves that my mum and dad made and love so unconditionally. Some may take this as narcissistic and showing off but if you knew how much courage it took to do this and the body trauma I have experienced as a kid you wouldn’t think those things. Thank you for helping me celebrate my body AS IT IS @ryanpfluger I have never felt safer than I did with you. I’ll always be at war with this bloody mirror but this shoot and this day was a step in the right fucking direction 👅🤘🏼🍑

I don’t think any of us have the perfect body and we are feeling more pressure to look good. And the pressure is starting when we are young.

There was a 2016 survey of more than 1,000 boys aged between 8 and 18 where 55% said they would consider changing their diet to look better and 23% said they believed there was “a perfect male body to strive for”.

They found that the four biggest sources of pressure on secondary school boys to look good were:

• Friends (68%)
• Social media (57%)
• Advertising (53%)
• Celebrities (49%)

I’m not a person who follows the crowd, but I have always struggled with my body image and hate being seen naked, or even shirtless. I don’t have the perfect body, I am carrying extra weight and, to put it in a nutshell, it makes me feel bad, awkward and embarrassed. People judge you as you walk on the street, especially if you are eating. They judge you when out shopping in the supermarket.

Fat is a self-induced illness and deserves no sympathy! Bullshit!

Fat is a symptom, as a society, we need to find the cause. One of those causes is body shaming which makes normal people feel bad, so they turn to food for comfort.

If you see a man struggling to walk with a cast on his leg, you feel sympathy. That plaster cast is protecting an injury. Just think of fat as a plaster cast we put on our body to protect our mental and emotional injuries.

If you take one thing from this post… Please don’t judge people. Fat, thin, tall, short, loud, quiet; you don’t know their story, and they may be different. Let’s celebrate difference.