How do we begin loving our bodies? Are we suppose to love our bodies? It’s complicated. We hear messages daily to love our bodies. We are told to be body positive or even body neutral. All the while, we are delivered both implicit and explicit messages regarding what is right and wrong for our bodies. As a result, we are often caught in a tug-of-war with our bodies: do we love them as they are or ‘work on them’ to be more socially favored?
Why body love is complicated
When we choose to love our bodies as they are, it is a complex and often risky endeavor. In choosing this path, we are revoking what society tells us we should be. While this may sound fine and even righteous, it isn’t easy. Emotionally, loving our bodies as they are can mean at best feeling fatigue at constantly pushing against the status quo and at worst, it can mean dealing with hate-filled speech and actions directed to our bodies and to us.
The body has become symbol of what is healthy, successful, intriguing and worth loving. The body represents to society who we are and what we value. Are we thin? Good. Then we are hard-working, determined, mindful, engaged fully in life, and overall, a worthy person. Permission granted to love our bodies. Are we fat? Bad. That must mean we are lazy, unloveable, unintelligent, lack direction and overall, an unworthy person (if a person at all). This is when we are invited to hate our bodies.
Loving our bodies means to fit into a must-look-and-feel-a-certain-way-box. If we do not fit into this box, it means that we do not have a place in society, that we have become ‘othered.’ As a result, we are labeled, passed over for jobs, disregarded and slammed on social media, and eliminated from a multitude of experiences that are a basic human right.
Therefore, loving our bodies is more than repeating positive affirmations every day. It starts with an understanding that through decades of messaging, we have been taught to disregard other bodies so that ours has a place in social ranking; or to hate our own bodies so others feel comfortable knowing we won’t try and change the societal view of beauty. We have been taught to loathe and apologize for our bodies to uphold the status quo, the social ladder.
How to love our bodies
Instead of taking time today to critique ourselves in the mirror, force fake-love on our bodies, or attempt to change and/or hide our bodies, identify one way that you have been taught to make yourself small because of your body. Then, create a simple action step around changing this. I recommend reading The Body Is Not An Apology by Sonya Renee Taylor as a start. You may perhaps choose to journal about what you’ve been taught, or shown. Another idea is to create an outline of a body that you can fill in with magazine cut-outs of what you’ve been told about how to look and/or what you’ve been told about how others should look. Finally, consider all the feelings you have about this and be honest about these feelings.
If you want to explore this more with me, reach out. I offer intensive therapy as a way to explore, deconstruct, and resurrect body stories and messages.
Loving the body is not as simple as saying ‘yes’ to what’s in front of the mirror. It is nuanced and highly emotional. Let’s take time to deconstruct what we’ve been told as a place to begin.
