Machado’s world is a reflection of what it is like for many women who suffer with body image in the modern day. The protagonist was constantly thinking about her body and the way that she looked which resulted in an unhealthy relationship with food. While it is ok to want to change the way your body looks, there is a difference between doing it in a healthy way that benefits you in the long run and engaging in unhealthy habits which inhibit one’s happiness. There is a trend in society today where weight loss medications and surgeries are being pushed onto people. While many might say that these are the wrong ways to lose weight because the work isn’t being put in, you could also argue that people who go to the gym also practice toxic habits. For example, someone who goes to the gym 6-7 days a week who is super active might look at themself and think they look disgusting while in reality they are in perfect shape. This might result in the use of steroids or stricter diets in order to achieve those unrealistic goals. This isn’t to say someone should just go on and do surgery, but in a broader sense not everyone is going to be happy with the way you look so it only matters what you think about yourself. This is shown with the guilt the protagonist feels after the surgery and the way her daughter criticized her due to them having the same body. While it did make her daughter feel bad, it wasn’t about her and if her mother wanted to change the way she looked because she wasn’t happy that is ok. Despite this the protagonist should learn to love her body with or without surgery because even if she has the most perfect body, unless she truly thinks highly of herself she will never see that. 

This entry is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International license.