This Awful Mirror Wants to Tell You Exactly What's Wrong with Your Body
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A new smart mirror just gave you even more reason to avoid your own reflection.
Fitness technology company Naked Labs released a high-tech mirror and rotating scale called the Naked 3D Fitness Tracker, which scans your body in 20 seconds and creates a "heat map" that identifies areas of muscle and fat. If that's not enough to make you want to duck and cover, the device also calculates your body mass index and measurements of your waist, thighs, calves, hips and biceps.
The mirror isolates areas where you are gaining fat (and muscle, to be entirely fair) and allows you to track how exercise has improved your body over time—or not. If this sounds like an elaborate form of emotional torture, it may be because you are already inundated by images of unrealistic bodies in pop culture and contemporary media almost constantly.
Still, the company's founder insists it isn't only intended to incentivize fitness. "We have even tracked pregnancies month by month with some of our beta users so that they could see how their pregnancy changed their bodies," Farhad Farahbakhshian told Mashable.
Body shaming is dangerous.
Many women and young girls face body shaming online and in their day-to-day lives, but it is particularly harmful to those who suffer from eating disorders and body dysmorphia.
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Eating disorders are a lifelong struggle. Even once a person has received medical treatment and recovered from an eating disorder, it's incredibly easy to be triggered and slip into harmful old habits. A 2005 study in Psychological Medicine found that 35 percent of women who recovered from anorexia relapsed within two years.
In November 2015, "Modern Family" star Reid Ewing shared his battle with body dysmorphia — a disorder that leads people to obsess over perceived physical flaws — in an op-ed on the Huffington Post. Many people who suffer from BDD, like Ewing, become addicted to plastic surgery in an attempt to quell an insatiable desire to eliminate imperfections.
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Even good habits such as healthy eating and exercise can become harmful compulsions that lead people to obsess over their weight, which is both mentally destabilizing and practically disruptive to everyday life.
