Is loving your body just another “should” that you can’t live up to?
I want to let you in on a little secret.
I really don’t like most “Love Your Body” campaigns.
Just as you are bombarded with reasons why you SHOULD lose weight, change your hair, whiten your teeth, change your body shape etc., you’re now also getting the message (sometimes, a corporate message) that you SHOULD love your body.
Whenever I write about loving your body (like just last week), I get a lot of pushback. No matter how many times I say that loving your body is not an imperative, that I’m just giving advice for those who want to try to love their body more, I get a lot of angry responses from people who say they can’t love their body or that they’re sick of feeling pressure to love their body.
I want to say again that I get it. I really do. We all have so much pressure on us to be perfect people by being perfect in our eating habits, work habits, exercise habits, parenting habits, and on and on, so loving our bodies feels like another item on our endless to-do list of “shoulds.”
It seems to me that many Love Your Body campaigns come across as empty reminders that you’re supposed to be doing yet another thing that you’re not doing. They also give the impression that loving your body is like flipping a switch, something that you just do, and then all of a sudden you’re taking selfies for your fatkini tumblr and living a badass, body-loving lifestyle.
I think that can happen for some people, but it’s the rare person who can really flip that switch without a lot of effort.
So I want to share three essential truths about loving your body that I’ve encountered in my five years of coaching people to love their bodies.
TRUTH: Loving Your Body (Usually) Takes Time
Before I started my coaching practice, I worked on loving my body for about a year. After a year, I felt that I was in a good enough place to work with other people.
I had made huge strides in that year, but the way I feel about myself and my body has changed and deepened since then in ways that I couldn’t have imagined.
I literally don’t think negative thoughts about my body EVER any more. They just don’t enter my mind. I don’t have bad body days or days when I blame my body for my problems.
The way I feel about my body should not be a goal for you (see Truth #3) but I will tell you that the process takes time to sink in in a really deep way. If you want to try to love your body, you need to give yourself the time and space to see what loving your body means and can mean for you. If you don’t give yourself that time, if you throw in the towel when a bout of body hatred comes back, the whole process will seem impossible.
TRUTH: Loving Your Body (Usually) Isn’t Easy
When 99% of the messages you receive about your body are that your body is not okay, loving it is a tough job.
It takes an immense amount of mental work to think about your body in positive ways, to banish negative thoughts, to put your body first when work, familial, and social obligations say you should put it last.
It takes commitment to bounce back from “bad body days.” It takes guts to set boundaries with people who criticize your body.
I have clients that join my group program, The Big Beautiful Goddess Academy, every time it’s offered. And that isn’t because they failed the first few times or anything of the sort. They do it because they know they want to do more work on loving their bodies. They know that they need and want to go deeper with the process and they know they need more support to keep going.
So if loving your body is HARD for you, you are not alone. This is part of the process.
TRUTH: Loving Your Body Requires You To Throw Away Old Models Of Perfection
I feel like I address perfectionism very often in this blog, and it makes sense. Folks who struggle with negative body image are accustomed to deflecting attention from their bodies by being “perfect” in other aspects of their lives.
But loving your body requires you to let go of perfectionism in a big way.
Just like loving your body as it is requires you to let go of your prior concepts of an ideal body, the journey of loving your body requires you to let go of your concept of the perfect way to love your body.
In other words, it’s time to let go of your idea of what loving your body has to look like.
If loving your body sounds like a good idea, take one step toward it. Just one step. Peruse this blog, or check out my body love resources or my book.
There Is NO Love Your Body Imperative
If you take one thing away from this post, I hope it’s that you don’t have to love your body. There is no imperative. There is no pressure. And if you want to love your body, it takes patience, and work, and a bit of love for the process.
Golda is a certified holistic health counselor and founder of Body Love Wellness, a program designed for plus-sized women who are fed up with dieting and want support to stop obsessing about food and weight. To learn more about Golda and her work, click here.
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“If loving your body is hard for you, you are not alone.” – @bodylovewellnes http://t.co/Sj0HHg2F4T WORD!
This is a great article! How true that loving your body can just become another thing we don’t feel we are doing good enough, another way to feel defective! And I like what Toni just said in her comment. I remember quite a while ago attending a workshop by Carol Johnson, author of Self-Esteem Comes in All Sizes. She spoke about body acceptance vs loving your body, how what is important is that negative body thoughts/feelings do not interfere with living life to the fullest.
As always, you’re great at expressing what so many of us feel! In terms of my body-love, it’s just like the other love (esp with my husband) — “you’re driving me NUTS right now but that’s OK, I love you still!” Love is a choice to take care of something of value to you — sometimes you need to feel angry, hurt & pissed to be able to remind yourself of that choice.
As always, you’re great as expression what so many of us feel! In terms of my body-love, it’s just like the other love (esp with my husband) — you’re driving me NUTS right now but that’s OK, I love you still! Love is a choice to take care of something of value to you — sometimes you need to feel angry, hurt & pissed to be able to remind yourself of that choice.
you have really managed to perfectly articulate a point that i struggle with a lot. I write the calming manatee blog and I often get emails going “HOW DARE YOU TELL ME TO FEEL GOOD.” and I have been trying to find a way to say “That’s okay, you don’t have to if you don’t want.”
Eloquence incarnate! :)
For me it has been great help not to focus on loving my body, but on all the great things it does for me. Loving my body almost was an accident.
Me too.
I doubt I’ll ever love my body. At this point I tolerate it, but that’s about as good as it gets.
I have to say, I don’t love my body, but I have accepted it…lovingly..and I don’t view it with hatred or disgust the majority of the time. So I’ll take that. Yes, it’s definitely an ongoing process, and I’ll say I spent the first 40yrs of my life trying to change it or being uphappy about it, so acceptance works for me, at this time.