I Support Body Positivity, Except When It Comes to Mine
At the beginning of the year, I weighed 115 pounds. Since the quarantine times, I’ve gained quite a bit. It’s my own fault, it just happens to coincide with staying indoors almost 100% of the time. So now, I’m stuck in a place where I’m trying to lose that weight (again). I can’t go the gym and now that it gets dark at 4:30 here in the Pacific Northwest, I don’t even want to be outside. Of course, there are a lot of excuses, but I’m still working on losing this weight in other ways and it’s *kind of* working. I’m not here to talk about that. I’m not here for opinions on what I should or shouldn’t do. I live with a gym rat who’s been doing the exercise/eat right thing for probably about 10 years now. I know what I need to do. I’m here to talk about a different, more important underlying issue.
I think a lot of us feel this way, man/woman/person/however any of us identify. We are generally recognizing body positivity in everyone except ourselves. Because, trust me, I am all about people looking however they want to look. I am all about people loving their bodies in whatever shape it is in. Healthy or not, it is not my place to tell someone how to love/treat their body. If you’re happy, I’m happy for you. That absolutely does not apply to me. I am not happy how my body is, right now. I feel awful, I feel like I look awful. I don’t like it, at all. I feel like I should love my body how it is, because I made it that way. But I also feel like, I need to change it because I don’t want it to look this way anymore. And, I think it’s kind of a slippery slope. I love myself as a personality, but not physically.
We as a society, tend to do this in general. We tend to outwardly express acceptance toward everyone else, leaving little to none for ourselves. I’m pretty sure there’s a psychology term for it. I don’t know offhand what it is, but if I think of it, I’ll add it in. We can tell other people all day long, that they are “beautiful just the way they are!” but when we look at ourselves, we are only beautiful if we fit in to our expectations for ourselves. It’s not right, but it is what it is. So how do we fix this? To any and all of those self loving beings, what did you do to become comfortable with how you looked and accepting your body for what it is? Asking for a friend.
There’s a lot of articles out there about this. And they all seem to have great advice. But in my experience, it seems like most of the people are body positive about themselves, have always been that way. And the rest, it seems like, developed it overnight. I’m sure they didn’t, but the social media effect is a very real thing. Going through my friends list right now, I can count on one hand how many were positive of their bodies before they went on their weight loss journey. They are so proud to show off how much they’ve lost, and good for them if it makes them happy. But by the same token, I have very few friends who comment on how they are happy with the body they currently have. Very few of them will say they are truly body positive about themselves, so the great advice from the articles, still only seems to somewhat apply. Easier said than done I guess.
I think what I’m trying to say is, if we are so keen to post our wins when it comes to weight loss, why don’t more people want to post their wins in body positivity? Why don’t we post photos that make us feel good, regardless of how we look and talk about the steps we’ve made towards recognizing that same positivity in ourselves as we would have for anyone else? I truly have no answers. Is it just a “rip the band-aid” type situation and just do it, regardless of how you feel? Is it a “fake it ’til you make it” type thing? Seriously, please let me know because I (and countless others) would love to know.
