There are a lot of issues being rolled together regarding people's weight and looks, and it tends to easily become overwhelming, I think.
First, the weight itself: I think we should approach this as a health issue. Some extra fat on the body is good for us, and is quite natural. Some people's bodies naturally retain more fat reserves than others, and so for those bodies it's right that they carry a little more fat than others. And some people's bodies are built in such a way that even relatively minimal fat reserves will create an appearance of more than is there. All these things are natural and normal and should be taken that way (contrary to the cultural idealizations we now have).
On the other hand, physical obesity is a genuine health threat, and should be considered as such, and not minimized by platitudes and excuses. There is something wrong with a body that is carrying large amounts of excess fat. Either the body is not working right or the personality inhabiting that body has become destructively distorted and is mistreating their body. And in either case, the problem should be addressed and corrected.
As to cultural ideals on beauty, however, I believe we've been sadly poisoning ourselves with our own greed for a long time, and one of the ways we do this is through our dishonest, self-serving, and unhealthy advertising. The sad truth is that advertisers need to make us feel bad about the way we look so they can sell us their "solution" to our ugliness. They need to make us feel bad about the way we smell so they can sell us the "solution" to our body oder problem. They need to make us feel unnoticed, and unappreciated, and disrespected, and ignored, and generally unfulfilled in every way, so that they can then sell us an veritable avalanche of foolish and useless products that promise to "correct" our endless flaws and empty lives. And pretty much all of us who are now living in industrialized nations have been raised from the day we were born seeing and hearing an endless parade of negative messages, and the promised "solutions" to our shortcomings, for so long that we have completely internalized them, and believe in them as if they were as real as gravity.
But they are mostly all lies.
I began to become aware of this when I was taking some nude drawing classes in college. Before taking the classes, I naturally assumed that all the models would look like Playboy bunnies and so I was quite looking forward to having an excuse to ogle them for hours as I drew images of them on paper. And in some cases this was true (though I was shocked and embarrassed to discover that some of the models were male "Playboy binnies"). But often they weren't "Playboy bunnies" at all. The nude models were just other college students, of all shapes and sizes, who happened not to be hung up about posing nude, and who could make some extra money for school by modeling for the art classes.
Sure, I ogled the "Playboy bunnies" for the first few minutes, but soon grew bored of that and began to realize that they often were not very interesting subjects to draw. The models that I liked drawing were the models with the more interesting bodies, and their bodies were more interesting because they were more unique. Some of them were heavy, some were very thin, some had very striking facial features and some were very tall, or short, or stocky. And it was these kinds of distinguishing features that made them expressive body structures, and it was that expressiveness that made them fun to draw - and fun to look at.
I began to realize that even after the class was over, and I was just walking around campus, I would catch myself looking at people's body structures, and at the way they walked, and at the expressions on their faces, and find myself appreciating how wonderful and interesting and expressive they really were. I remember seeing a very tall, and powerfully built woman walking down the street in Chicago and just being in awe of the majestic way her body moved, with her shoulders back, and the way she carried her head up. And she was not a woman that we would ever see in a fashion magazine. She was way "too tall", had a longish face, a wide mouth, and a strong powerful body rather than the petite kind we see in magazines. Yet she was stunning! I would've liked to have told her how amazingly interesting and beautiful I thought she looked (but of course we don't say those things to strangers in this society).
But from then on I began to look at people differently. I have nothing against the men and women I see in the magazines. They're pretty, too, though we see so many of them that they become a bit generic. But I often wish I could tell people I see on the street just how great they really look. Especially the ones that don't look like magazine models. Because I suspect a lot of them wrongly believe that they're ugly, when in fact they're often far more beautiful than the magazine models. And it's not just the "look", but the bearing, and the attitude, and the way people move through the world around them.
