‘Even if I consume 3,400 calories a day, I will not gain weight’
Amber encounters a lot of misunderstanding when it comes to her underweight and the accompanying physical problems.
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Amber (27) has been thrown to death for years with comments about her weight. She weighs about 44 kilos, at a height of 1.61 meters. “‘So you are really thin’, they say, ‘bone warehouse’, ‘shelf’, or you can hear them whispering ‘anorexia’ in the distance,” she says. “Once I told someone that my son was not eating well, and I got the response: ‘That’s not so strange, if you are his example’. People immediately assume that I eat badly.”
While she has tried everything to gain weight. “I’ve been to several dieticians, to a doctor for blood tests, eating plans, training plans to gain muscle, drinking shakes for extra calories, you name it. But so far nothing has worked.”
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Eating ‘just’ at the snack bar night after night is of course not a solution either. “You want to gain weight in a healthy way. Nobody knows why I can’t do that. Even if I consume 3,400 calories a day, which I did for a while, I don’t gain weight. And it’s not that I exercise extremely much , I just take the car for everything.”
If someone who is overweight wants to lose weight, everyone understands that, but that Amber has trouble with her weight, people often wave away, according to her. “When I tell them I’m trying to gain weight, I’m often told not to whine. ‘I wish I had your body,’ they say.”
Weak, dizzy and easily sick
They don’t realize that that body comes with all kinds of health problems. Because Amber suffers from low blood pressure, which makes her dizzy quickly, and is always cold, even on summer days like this. “If there’s only a little wind, I’m shivering. I often feel weak, even if I’ve eaten well. If someone close to me gets sick, I get it anyway. My resistance is very low. physique has now been accepted, but due to these kinds of complaints I can’t just accept it.”
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And those annoying comments? “They don’t help. It depends a bit on who it comes from. At first I was very concerned, nowadays I can better put it aside. I have the idea that people do not realize that comments about being underweight are also common.”
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underweight
From the CBS health survey 2019 shows that 2.5 percent of the Dutch population aged 4 years and older is underweight. The Central Bureau of Statistics (CBS) uses the BMI limit of 18.5 kg/m2 for all adults.
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‘Shamende comments about how you look are always hurtful’
Karima el Bakkali founded the platform Get fat with me of which 11 thousand women are now members.
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Karima el Bakkali (23) also got to her head. Comments like: “You’re so thin,” “You’re not curvy at all,” and “You don’t look good, are you eating enough?” “People often said that, they didn’t realize that it was painful for me. While shamende comments about how you look are always hurtful. They make you insecure.”
Karima has Get fat with me founded, a community for underweight women who want to gain weight. “At the age of 14 I was a few kilos underweight myself. I wanted a healthy BMI, but could hardly find any information about gaining weight. All the articles I came across were about losing weight. I started looking into nutrition myself and I managed to do it in two months time enough to gain weight.Through social media others came across my path who asked my advice, and from there it is Get fat with me originate. It has grown into a platform of more than 11 thousand women.”
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In that community, it is often about skinny shaming: criticizing or ridiculing underweight. “When I used to say I wanted to gain weight, people would joke about it,” Karima says. “‘I let you have 10 kilos, haha.’ I noticed that the threshold for making comments like that is very low for thin people. We are taught from childhood that it is not nice to call someone fat, but calling someone thin is apparently not a problem. the eyes of society are good, and they are not full. Most people want to lose weight, slim is the beauty ideal. As a result, people do not see that you can also be insecure if you are slim.”
Pushed into the anorexic corner
According to Karima, underweight is an underexposed problem. “It’s always about being overweight and losing weight, but we don’t talk too much about the other side. Underweight is often pushed right into the anorexic corner, but it’s something completely different. People with anorexia are afraid of getting fat, people with underweight want to gain weight. That also has a lot of influence on your life, but there is hardly any attention to it. It is not taken so seriously.”
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