My Take on Body Image

We are so highly criticized as women for how we look, which influences the way we perceive our bodies.

In so many conversations I’ve had with friends about body image, there’s this shared belief — sometimes unspoken because we don’t want to admit it out loud — that smaller is “better.”

I think so many of us have tried to make ourselves smaller at some point in our lives.

I remember when I was in the midst my eating disorder, I had this urge to make myself as small as possible.

And that translated beyond just my physical body. I was shrinking myself in all the ways. Taking up as little space as possible.

Women are often taught to be small, polite, quiet and sweet.

That’s the safest thing you can be as a woman.

And now with the emergence of the Body Positivity movement, we can start to feel like we’re doing something wrong if we’re not totally in love with how our bodies look all the time.

While there's nothing wrong with body positivity, body neutrality can be a more realistic concept to hold the complexity of experiences in your body.

Body positivity can conjure up black & white ideas that you'll 'always' feel good in your body, love the way it looks and be in the mood to celebrate your appearance all the time.

Not experiencing these things all the time doesn't mean you've still got work to do.

Just like goals around happiness 100% of the time, our experiences in our bodies are varied, layered, paradoxical, multicoloured — trying to hold a single view or feeling about your body is an exhausting job and a bit of a cruel task.

Body neutrality is a gentle baseline — it's that place where things are neither terrible or wonderful — your body 'just is'

And from that baseline a wide variety of experiences which are temporary and moving flow through.

It’s not so fixed, which is not supportive to the fluidity of life and experience of inhabiting a woman’s body.

I want to leave you with one last thought that significantly shifted my relationship to my body—

Nothing got me any closer to finding peace with the way my body looked until I started doing things from a place of:

“I want to do this because I deserve to feel good and I want to treat my body well.”

Even beyond body image… If you look at the motivation behind your choices in all areas of life and start making decisions motivated by self-kindness versus wanting something about ourselves to be different because we think it’s ‘wrong’ – you’ll always see better results. ❤️