People who work in the entertainment industry and are required to appear in front of the camera are expected to look their best all the time. And by best I mean toned, chiselled, fair, flawless and definitely not bloated. However, celebrities are human too. Even they have textured skin, stretch marks, flabs, and sometimes a bloated stomach.
However, due to the constant invigilation by the public eye, many tend to have severe body image issues. Television actor Nia Sharma is one of them. In an interview, she revealed that there was a time when she stopped eating because she wanted her belly to look flat.
View this post on Instagram
Hindustan Times quoted her saying:
“I stopped eating, man. When I say I stopped eating, it’s not even about a diet. I would sleep hungry, I was waking up hungry, I would go to the gym hungry. Hungry bhi nahi, mujhe bhookh bhi nahi lag rahi thi (I would not even feel hungry), because I had lost my appetite. I just wanted to go so hard into that song, look so on-point. And I did, I was just looking at my belly and I was like, ‘Look at that’.”
Nia went on to add that she has “bloating issues”.
“I am a very average-looking girl and I accept that, there is no harm in talking like that. Hate is a very strong word, there is nothing I would like to change in my body. I have bloating issues, I have phases or maybe not, maybe it was in my head that I was a girl who was thin all the time but it cannot happen.”
View this post on Instagram
It took time for her to come to terms with her body. But on her journey, she did suffer from meltdowns because her body didn’t look the way she wanted. In fact, before the release of her music video ‘Phoonk’, she was allegedly shivering and panicking.
“It took me years to come to terms with the fact that I cannot have a flat belly 365 days a year. It is not possible, I will eat, I will put water in my body, it will bloat. Mere bas woh issues hai (I have only these issues) and sometimes, I can’t deal with them. I end up crying, I have meltdowns.”
For so long, society had set such unattainable body and beauty standards that those who didn’t match the “ideal body type” ended up suffering from self-esteem and body-image issues. Now, with varied other body types being represented on the screen, we hope that people’s perception changes too.