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It’s easy to be sensitive about the smallest change in weight or appearance — after all, no one looks at you more than you do. Maybe you wake up in the morning after a night in which you ate a larger meal than usual. You look in the mirror and ask yourself: Was this belly fat always here? Should my chin be more defined? Do I need to go up a jeans size? These seem like simple, practical questions, but for many people, obsessing over weight gains and losses causes harmful body image stress.
There are a variety of social and personal factors that combine to create the sensitivity we have about how we look, but the result is typically the same. Diet and weight gain stress can lead to a number of unhealthy attitudes and behaviors that can severely impact mental health as a whole.
In this piece, we’ll explore how weight gain anxiety and body image stress cause people to take extremely unhealthy actions and create a harmful conception of self-worth.