Too Fat for Europe, Too Skinny for Africa? The Beauty Standards That Trap Us

We step into the tangled, deeply personal politics of body image - and the fat and skinny shaming scripts that shape how we see ourselves, each other, and the people we love.

We open with a conversation about what it means to be two women in a relationship with entirely different body types; each of us shaped by radically different cultural beauty standards in our own homes. From Lagos to London, Malawi to the Midlands, we unpack how the same body can be celebrated in one place and critiqued in another - and sometimes by the very same people!

Tamanda shares her lifelong entanglement with weight, the childhood humiliations that stuck, and how growing up in southern Africa taught her that a bigger body could be a symbol of health, wealth, and desirability. Meanwhile, Aiwan reflects on the flip side: the invisibility and dismissal that can come with being naturally slim, the “chicken bone legs” taunts of school, and why she’s had to defend the legitimacy of skinny shaming as real harm.

Along the way, we trace the food rules and body scripts we inherited: from family kitchens lined with SlimFast boxes, to the public weigh-ins of Weight Watchers, to today’s Ozempic era. We unpack how those scripts collide in our relationship, how they shape intimacy, and what it takes to stop policing each other’s bodies when the culture won’t.

In this episode:

• Loving each other while living in very different bodies and body rules
• Why fat and skinny shaming are two sides of the same policing coin
• The cultural flip: how African and European standards can praise or condemn the same body
• Family food rules and public humiliation, from SlimFast to “30 lemons a day”
• Weight Watchers, Ozempic, and the shifting landscape of current-day diet culture
• What it means to write new body scripts in love and in life

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