A teenage girl is walking ahead of her parents. She hears them giggling behind, turns around and asks them what they are talking about. Her dad says: “You’d have a beautiful body if your legs weren’t that fat”. That girl was my mum.
The body positivity movement has taught me that beauty is subjective. I’ve been fortunate enough to be told by my parents how beautiful I am, and I grew up thinking just that. I’m very grateful for that and I know they didn’t do it consciously, thinking it will help me in life, that’s just something they believed themselves. I also know I could’ve been a different person if the beliefs they developed in me were different.
It’s funny how we create self-beliefs based on as little as one comment, especially if that comment is from one of the main people in our lives, someone we look up to and respect.
I no longer look for weight loss resources and instead have learnt not to just accept, but also to love my body the way it is. This has been helped by rereading the book “Intuitive Eating” by Evelyn Tribole and Elyse Resch. They’ve got a section there called “Respect Your Body”.
Here are some key points:
Accept your genetic blueprint. Just as a person with a shoe size of eight would not expect to realistically squeeze into a size six, it is equally futile (and uncomfortable) to have the same expectation about body size. But mostly, respect your beautiful body, so you can feel better about who you are. It’s hard to reject the diet mentality if you are unrealistic and overly critical about your body shape.
Has all the self-loathing because of your body helped? Has dwelling on your imperfect body parts helped you to become leaner, or merely make you feel worse? Does chewing yourself out every time you step on the scale make you lose weight?
Studies have shown that the more you focus on your body, the worse you feel about yourself. Yet the body torture game goes on—Mirror, Mirror, on the wall, who’s the slimmest of them all?
It’s hard to escape the body torture game when the whole world is playing it. In the name of fitness, a lean and hard shape has become the body icon for modern times. Self-proclaimed fitness gurus insist that you can “sculpt” your body as if it were a lump of clay, that you can change your genetic shape with an aerobic huff and puff.
The fashion world has also shaped the ideal look for women into various versions of thin—from the sixties Twiggy figure to the waif look first embodied by supermodel Kate Moss. Even the full-bodied fashion look turns out to be too thin by medical standards. When clothing giant, Guess, hired model Anna Nicole Smith, she made headlines in the fashion and news media because she was “big.” Her weight was actually in the lower range of ideal according to 1990 U.S. height and weight charts! If a normal weight is considered “big,” what does that say to the average woman? This hardly fosters realistic body-shape expectations.
Consider these basic premises of body respect:
• My body deserves to be fed. • My body deserves to be treated with dignity. • My body deserves to be dressed comfortably and in the manner to which I am accustomed. • My body deserves to be touched affectionately and with respect. • My body deserves to move comfortably.
To say I recommend this book would be an understatement. In fact, they’ve got a qualification program I’m planning to complete, as part of my journey to being compassionate and helpful to my clients during personal styling questions.
Image by Maggie Stephenson