Big or Beautiful or Both?

Now I know that whilst preferred shape and shade can be personal, it is also always culturally linked and can vary with the era as well as the place. When I visit home all tanned from the Nicaraguan sun, people invariably comment how healthy I look - the concept supposedly coming from the idea in more recent years of a tan as an indication of enough wealth to travel overseas on vacation and perhaps the fact that you should feel more relaxed and healthy after a holiday. A hundred years or so ago the palest skin was prized as a indication of sufficient wealth to avoid manual work in the sun.

Whilst sun beds are marketed to the pale skinned, bleaching products are promoted to the darker skinned.

Size matters too and also how it's talked about. In Guyana no-one would hesitate to say "you getting fat" or "you getting fine" or that I was "putting on/throwing off size", it was just a friendly observation and sometimes I felt that I was going from "putting on" to "throwing off" size so fast it must have been ounces, not pounds they were talking about! My brain knows the British obsession with thin as the ideal form is not realistic or even always desirable, but none the less I warned several friends not to ever say to someone in the UK that they were fat or even getting there - at least not if they hoped the other person might speak to them again.

Even health charts seem to be geared towards the cultural norms. My 6'2" dad, who's been thin all his life was all of a sudden last year according to his doctor's charts deemed as getting close to "obese", whilst my weight, with definitely a higher Body Mass Index, was deemed the high end of normal, not even quite making it into "overweight" by my Nicaraguan doctor. In fact the doctor who attended me told me I shouldn't lose weight as my face would start to look gaunt and I'd look older. No diets, that's what I like!

In a Spanish-English dictionary if you look up the word "hermosa" you will see the definition "beautiful". However when "hermosa" is used in Nicaragua it generally means chubby, plump or fat. I haven't worked out whether that's because fatter is beautiful, or whether it's simply a nicety. So despite knowing other cultures I've lived in don't have the same view of size or even talking about size and that they don't have the terrible British underlying correlation that fat means ugly I was surprised to find myself abruptly irritated when a smiling work colleague told me I looked "beautiful" in my jeans after returning from a recent holiday during which I'd eaten a lot. Made me wonder how even living abroad for quite long periods we carry so much internalised beliefs from our culture, even largely illogical ones, and how potentially damaging that can be to good understanding and relations with others.