BODY IMAGE AND SELF-ESTEEM
“I’m too fat”
“If I lose 10lbs I’ll be perfect”
“My lips are too thin”
“My stomach is so flabby, why can’t I have a flat stomach. I won’t ever look good. I hate the way I look.”
Do any of these sound familiar? I know I have told myself many of these comments and others ones like them multiple times over the years. It seems like no matter what I do, I won’t ever be able to attain the version of beauty that I have been chasing. Many people started off 2019 with the goal of losing weight, and by February, there is often a feeling of defeat or frustration that people experience because of the high expectations and/or unfair goals they have set for themselves, which can send them spiraling down with negative thoughts and emotions. It doesn’t help that social media is filled with images and posts of beauty bloggers and fitness gurus yammering on about “being your best you” and peddling an array of nonsense products filled with false promises of beauty perfection. We are not born hating our bodies, it’s not a feeling or thought we have innate within us. We learn to find flaws with our body as we receive messages that we need to be thinner, skinnier, lighter, stronger, and generally better than how we are now. We are not taught to accept our bodies, to be comfortable in our own skin, and to recognize that everyone on this planet will have a different body type from the person next to them, and that is okay.
What does it mean to accept your body, and how to you do it? It starts by recognizing and respecting your body as it is in the present moment and replacing that idea that “I’m not the right body type”, with “My body is not any less or more acceptable than any other body type”. It is a challenging concept to accept and internalize and it will take time because you have to fight with all the conflicting thoughts and beliefs that you hold. The messages that you have received from the media, from your peers, from your family, and from even yourself. Question yourself when you notice the harsh thoughts you have about your appearance. Does your weight, the shape of your nose, the size of your pants define who you are as a person or are you more than your body appearance? What would life be like if you loved yourself at
whatever body size you were? Who are you outside of your body type? What makes you who you are? I can assure you that it likely has very little or absolutely nothing to do with the size or appearance of your body. Self-hate is never a start to making a healthy change for yourself. Through self-love, caring, and kindness, we can make long-lasting change and become more resilient, confident and comfortable in our own skin.
A simply step you can take to shifting away from unrealistic body ideals is to go through your social media, and unfollow accounts that are promoting unhealthy, and unrealistic body ideal and try to follow accounts that display a more diverse range of body types and promote self-acceptance as opposed to self-judgement and self-criticism. It may also help to ditch the scale. That number staring back at you can often be that start of unhealthy and unrealistic body goals. Instead of focusing on decreasing that number, it may help to shift your focus on your health and engage in physically activity that actually makes you feel GOOD and that you enjoy doing. Studies find that engaging in a physically activity can help to improve body image even if you are not doing enough to change your body.
