Shame & Body Shame in Asian Cultures :How to Live in Bigger Bodies Peacefully as Asian Americans

Dear clients,

If you grew up in an Asian family or around Asians, you may have heard people talking nonchalantly about other people’s bodies and appearances. Perhaps, you feel the dread every time holidays roll around and you have to visit your families, thinking, “What are they going to say this time? Are they going to tell me how fat I got?”

According to the National Institute of Health (NIH), almost 50% of all American adults experienced weight gain during the pandemic due to isolation and psychological distress. Many Asian clients I serve have shared with me their fear of visiting home or family after living in the United States with a different lifestyle, one shaped by long commutes, sedentary work, and a car-centric society.

But beneath the fear of comments or judgment lies something deeper: shame.
Shame is not just embarrassment about how we look. It’s the belief that our worth decreases when our body changes. It’s the inner voice that whispers, “If only I looked smaller, then I’d deserve love, attention, or belonging.”

In many Asian cultures, shame functions as a form of control. From a young age, we learn that our appearance is not ours alone. How we look reflects our parents, our upbringing, and even our family’s honor. Some of us grew up hearing, “I gave birth to you, so your body is mine.” That belief turns love into possession. It teaches us that our bodies are family property, not personal agency.

The problem is that what is meant as “care” often becomes criticism.

“You’d be so pretty if you lost a little weight.”
“You’re too skinny. You look sick.”
“You should stop eating that, you’re getting big.”

Each comment chips away at the sense of peace we have in our bodies. Over time, we internalize the idea that our body must always be managed, never trusted, never accepted as it is.

On top of that, Asian Americans inherit another layer of expectation through Eurocentric beauty standards that dominate Western culture. Fair skin, small features, and thinness are often seen as the ideal, rooted in colonial hierarchies that equate whiteness with beauty, status, and control. When these Western ideals merge with Asian family expectations, the result is a body that is constantly under surveillance from both sides.

So how do we live peacefully in bigger bodies as Asian Americans?

First, we reclaim ownership of our bodies. Your body is not a family project, not an extension of your parents’ pride, and not a site for others’ commentary. Your body belongs to you, regardless of who raised it, fed it, or shaped its early years.

Second, we challenge the myth that beauty and worth are determined by proximity to whiteness or thinness. Decentering Eurocentric beauty means expanding what beauty looks like. It means seeing softness, roundness, and difference as part of our humanity, not as something to fix.

Third, we redefine health. Health is not a number on a scale or how you appear in photos. Health is your ability to live freely, to eat without fear, to move in ways that connect you to yourself, and to rest without guilt.

Peace begins when we start asking harder questions.
What would it mean to live in a body that no longer needs to earn love? What if beauty wasn’t something to chase but something we inherited, a quiet strength that survived migration, assimilation, and scrutiny?

We cannot heal body shame by simply learning to love our bodies. We heal by understanding the systems that taught us to mistrust them. When we recognize how colonialism, capitalism, and patriarchy have shaped the way we see ourselves, we begin to see that the problem was never our bodies. It was the lens we were taught to use.

To live peacefully in your body as an Asian American is not to reject your culture, but to expand it. It is to carry forward what was protective — community, care, discipline — and leave behind what was punishing. It is to stop confusing control with love. Peace is not passive acceptance. It is an active remembering of who we were before shame taught us to shrink.

With lots of love,

Dr. Wonbin