More Than A Body: Your Body Is an Instrument, Not an Ornament

by Lexie Kite

Assuming you’ve glanced at a magazine, driven past a billboard, watched TV or movies, or scrolled through Instagram’s most popular profiles in the last few years, you’ve got a good idea of what media’s definition of an attractive, healthy, “normal” woman looks like, and it likely shows up in your own body image map.

When that self-worth is largely based on others’ perceptions of her appearance, and others don’t seem to be appreciating it as hoped, her entire self-worth suffers.

Therapy is for everyone.

Find work or service that is meaningful and helps you do some good. Exercise your talents and create something—art, music, poetry, or creative writing. Your life is bigger than what you look like, and finding purpose is key to stepping outside the constraints of self-objectification.

We tear people down by disparaging how they look, and we build them up by validating how they look.

Your health was never really improved by or dependent upon looking a certain way, yet the lie that thinness and good health are inseparable is rampant.

My body is an instrument, not an ornament.

Don’t decide what you want to weigh or how you want to look—decide how you want to feel, what you want to do, and what you want to experience along the way.

“The only way to solve the weight problem is to stop making weight a problem—to stop judging ourselves and others by our size.

We are burdened with the task of looking beautiful and feeling beautiful (to others as well as to ourselves) because we live in a world that defines our value in terms of our physical appeal to others and defines our body image in terms of our physical appeal to ourselves.

We want inclusion and representation, not equal-opportunity objectification.

You aren’t a disappointment; you are a human doing the incredibly hard work of owning and embracing your full humanity.