So I know I’ve already spoken about ignoring articles telling you to follow magic tips that will make you love yourself and your body. So think of this is as the direct opposite of those articles and those tips, generally all the things the fitspo stars and bloggers want you to do and think.
Here it is: you do not need to love your body every minute of every day.
What a revelation, what a crazy idea! No? Ok let me explain.
There is so much constant pressure telling you that you need to love your body. And how does that make you feel if you don’t exactly have the best body image? This massive burden telling you you’ve failed at life if you don’t love your body day in day out. I’m here to tell you that every now and then, don’t feel bad if you don’t love every single thing about yourself! I don’t think there’s anything wrong with having an off day about your body or randomly don’t love some part of your body. So what!
As long as you aren’t doing anything to fight these ideas that may have a negative impact on your overall health of course (ie. Skipping meals or excessive exercise). Surely if you love your body around 80% of the time, you’re doing pretty great (not an actual statistic, feel free to adjust to suit you). Maybe loving your body 50% of the time is a massive achievement for you. Maybe its more or maybe it’s’ less. It doesn’t matter, its baby steps and you’re doing great!
This is what I mean about body image not being a one-size fits-all thing to work on and fix in the same way. What is a problem for you might be easy for someone else; and what someone else might struggle with, you might not even give a second thought to. This could be that you’re not completely in love with the thought of wearing a crop top, but wear skinny jeans like they are your uniform. That’s completely fine and great and awesome. Everyone’s struggles are different.
I saw an advertisement on TV saying some massive percentage of women have one negative thought about their body a week. They were presenting this statistic as a bad thing that we all need to work on. However I thought ‘Just one? Just one negative thought? How amazing is that!’ With the amount of images in the media that are screaming at us day in day out that we should look like this and wear this etc, the amount of negative thoughts we could be having about our bodies could be basically limitless. So I thought this was a pretty great thing. If you love your body 100% of the time, that’s fantastic! But if every now and then you fall off the self-love bandwagon, that’s ok too. You’re going to be ok. Just remember that tomorrow you can go back to a pretty great body image, whatever that means for you and your body.
Tarsh
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Body ImageSpeaking to someone about your problems can be the first steps to a solution.
