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A more effective approach to healing our body image issues needs to reflect the understanding that focusing on the appearance of our bodies is the problem.
Positive body image isn’t believing your body looks good; it is knowing your body is good, regardless of how it looks.
You hate your body instead of hating the expectation that your body fit a certain mold.
You hate your weakness and lack of discipline instead of hating the profit-driven solutions that are designed to require a lifetime of purchases but still leave you short of perpetually out of reach ideals.
When we keep attempting to fix an internal, mental problem with outside, physical solutions, those quick fixes will never really solve our problems,
Most media messages about women’s bodies are based on the idea that our happiness, health, power, and relationship status depend upon our consumability—how good we look to others and how irresistibly sexy we are.
Advertising targeted at girls and women largely relies upon us believing two things: 1) our happiness, health, and ability to be loved are dependent on our appearance; and 2) it is possible to achieve physical ideals—and thus become worthy of happiness, health, and love—with the help of the right products or services.
None of those supposed flaws would be of concern if we valued those parts of our bodies for the function they serve and how we experience them from inside ourselves.
questioning how we look to questioning how we’ve been trained to see ourselves.
If everyone is a competitor, no one is really on your team.
Your beauty is not your life’s work.
We feel defined by how we appear, and so we define everyone else, friend or foe, by how they appear, positively or negatively.
Society sets rules to regulate the ways female bodies are allowed to appear with the intention of protecting the male bodies and minds that apparently need to be externally (and not internally) controlled.
Girls learn the most important thing about them is how they look. Boys learn the most important thing about girls is how they look. Girls look at themselves. Boys look at girls. Girls are held responsible for boys looking at them. Girls change how they look. Boys keep looking. The problem isn’t how girls look. The problem is how everyone looks at girls.
The truth is, when we stop giving beauty the power to make us, we take away its power to break us.
“I know you mean that as a compliment, but I’m working on my body image and that means I’m trying to find my value beyond my looks. I could really use a reminder that I’m worth more than how I appear!” or “Thanks! And you just reminded me that I’ve actually set a goal to validate people for more than their bodies. Do you want to try this out with me? It’s hard at first, but so worth it to help people see how amazing they are for more than their looks.”
When you learn to see more in yourself and your health, you see that the look of your body does not always correlate with your health or happiness.
Your body image is not the literal image of how your body appears, or even your feelings about how it appears. It is your feelings about your body—the body you live inside, grew up with, and experience life through.
We want to let swimsuits be just that: items of clothing to wear in the water. Not badges of honor or tests of courage or proof of pride. Our swimsuits prove nothing about our body images and they shouldn’t have to. They’re just swimsuits.
