This Woman Nails The Problem With Concern Trolling Women Over Their Weight

Danica Marjanovic went from size 10 to 16

Gaining weight and accepting herself saved Danica Marjanovic’s life, and now she’s blogging about her experiences to help others. A lot of women have struggled with the scale, but for Marjanovic the stress was unbearable as she dealt with body dysmorphic disorder or BDD.

BDD is “a body-image disorder characterized by persistent and intrusive preoccupations with an imagined or slight defect in one’s appearance,” according to the Anxiety and Depression Association of America. As Marjanovic treated her BDD, she went from a size 10 to a size 16 and began to feel healthy and happy. Unfortunately, that wasn’t enough for folks who took it upon themselves to continually bombard her with messages telling her to exercise and lose weight.

https://www.instagram.com/p/BbRlZwugy-u/

As Marjanovic received one rude comment after another, she began to speak out on social media to set the record straight and help those who haven’t yet realized that healthy doesn’t mean a certain size clothing. “I can’t tell you how many fake health concerns/bullying/ body shaming comments I get that start with ‘I am all for self-love, BUT you should be working out to love your body,'” she explained in one Instagram post. “Just because my body does not conform to society’s standards of an eating disorder recovery body does not mean I am not overcoming a serious issue with restricting my food.”

For real. A photo doesn’t tell a person’s entire life story. And even if it did, unless someone specifically asks for your opinion on their body there’s no need to offer it.

Marjanovic said it best: “No one has the right to use their ill-informed ignorant judgment to tell me how I should or shouldn’t be showing love to my body.” Exactly. After months of therapy, the body positivity activist learned that she had recovered herself from undiagnosed anorexia. The heart-wrenching thing is she could have found treatment sooner if she had felt like she was worth it.

“Want to know why I was never diagnosed,” she shared. “Because I always felt not skinny enough to go get help about my issues with food and body image.”

https://www.instagram.com/p/BbxhMHyAvGo/?taken-by=lovefromdanica

Marjanovic also addressed a major issue in society’s continual exploitation of women’s bodies: no one cares about the health of skinny ladies. With a photo from the days where she was a size 10, Marjanovic wrote: “Where was my health concerns when I was showing strong signs of an eating disorder, severe anxiety, depression, and alcoholism? Oh yeah, that’s right, skinny people are the epitome of health and you can only judge a fat person by their lifestyle choices because they are the burden of society.” Anyone who has lost and gained more than a few pounds can attest to this behavior from others, myself included. But the comments about our bodies have only gotten worse as social media has become a part of our everyday lives.

But Marjanovic has the best advice on how to handle the trolls: “I can tell you that anyone that shames or bullies you for being fat and uses ‘health concerns’ as a dumb, easy way to approve their behavior should be fully ignored till their prejudice is educated otherwise.”