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Your body was beautiful from the moment it was born. What if you digested the idea that we all have been drank the tea of lies causing body shame, but that we can become aware of the lies and we do have a choice? What if you untied with your body to enjoy your life fully? We will begin to unpack this in this episode.
TRANSCRIPT:
I have been putting off writing Body Image and Body Kindness. Not because I don’t see the incredible value in it (contrarily, I believe this is some of the most important work there is), but because It’s been, hands down, my biggest struggle lately. For much of my life, this has been the case as well, and even though I am growing in leaps and bounds, I still battle old beliefs that I have to know everything about a topic in order to be of value to anybody else. But the truth here, dispelling this lie, is that although my story is not done yet, it can offer encouragement and support to other women in this arena.
There is so much vulnerability in the idea of what it means to be a woman, and for our culture and society, being a woman has had far too much of a superficial influence for a long time. Constantly the image that represents beauty is changing, but constantly women are measuring themselves to an impossible standard and finding it hard to find acceptance. I know that this is also holds quite true for men in many ways now, and pervasively more and more although it looks different and I can’t speak to it well without first hand experience.
Our world has messages for women represented as though they’re empowering, and often I believe that is the intention, but in reality, they are perfectionism in disguise. These lies can tell us two messages; that we can be anything we want to be, and that we should want to be this or that. For example, we “should” want to be maybe a skinny, tan, curvy, desirable, youthful, perfect woman, and if we try hard enough, we can. The truth is that we can be that real self that is inside of us, the self that is our own hero, but that real self has nothing to do with our appearance.
Society uses messages to tell us that our body is not enough. That our incredible bodies, that are designed with such intricate detail and precision are flawed and need to be starved, and pushed harder and harder, in order that they can achieve something that is often not even a reality and even if it may be possible short term, it is so challenging to even try to sustain for most people, and at what cost?
We are taught by these messages that we must be a certain weight to be healthy, that we must eat a certain way to be clean (or pure), and that we must have definition in the right places to be worthy of wearing certain things.
We are taught that fat is bad. We are taught that the fat must accumulate in certain areas in unrealistic proportions and there must be no fat in other areas; that muscle is good, but that we need to control the way our bodies look or we have let ourselves go. There are so many more messages out there of which these are just a few.
Let me tell you something vitally true that women of our society need to hear loud and clear today… Your body is not broken. Your body is not flawed.
And a note about the word Fat… If you are fat, it is does not mean you are bad, or not beautiful, or not worthy, or should be skinny. Fat should be reclaimed as the simple descriptive word that it is, and not used to tear down and to mean a bad thing. We literally need fat to live and so let’s liberate the word.
Your body has done incredible things to get you where you are today, from the moment of your birth, and should be honored. And whether you are fat, skinny, flat-chested, super tall, super short, or anywhere along a spectrum of the vast array of physical descriptions which you might identify with; your body is a blessing.
I have seen skinny women slam fat women. I’ve seen fat women slam skinny women. I’ve seen fat women slam fat women and skinny women slam skinny women. Men have done this too, but people, we have a choice here. This has to change and it has to start with our beliefs.
Being healthy DOES NOT begin with your weight or your appearance. Being beautiful does not have to do with the size of your nose, or your feet or your breasts. This is not a hurrah of “believe in yourself and then you can change yourself”. Screw that. You are enough. Your body is enough. Real motivation toward what matters and real success in what matters has to do with empowerment of you as a person, the being inside of this shell that has given life and expression through this physical existence. This body allows you to dance, run, hug, make love, laugh, write, learn, give birth, play with your kids, or your friend, to create, to feel pain, to feel love and joy and so much more. This body is the physical expression of your essence.
But so many of us are hiding. We are hiding in our own bodies, from ourselves. We are afraid of who we are because we don’t accept ourselves. WE learn from our society that there is always something on the outside that we should fix, and this distracts us from the truth of what needs attention on the inside. This keeps us trapped in the lies of the world around us, reacting to what is interpreted and never getting to know and love and embrace our incredible bodies which are our maker’s expression of creativity and love manifested. We are living and breathing art.
I remember when I was a young girl at the YMCA with my mother. We went into the sauna one day and an elderly woman commented on my body. It was one of the first times anybody had ever done this, but it was a powerful message that I accepted as gospel. I was very skinny at the time, as I was maybe 7, and she commented that I had such a perfect little body. She said “If only you could hold onto your body of youth…” dropping off of her thought, but the implication was palpable. Being skinny was necessary for happiness and for acceptance and it was also hard to maintain, but in order to be happy and lovable I would need to. I made a decision right then and there, that no matter what, I had to stay skinny, as my worth and happiness depended on it.
This is not a sob story about how I was skinny and gained five pounds and my world was rocked. (And sister I’m not judging that either) Please realize that all of us women, and men too, have deeply ingrained messages such as this that we picked up as kids, or later, that are either like this or different, but that reflected to us the value that society places on our bodies and plants a seed for shame. We also have differences of bodies, not just ideas. Weather it has to do with our noses, our hair, our legs, our acne, our weight, or whatever else it was. The messages permeate each of us.
As an adult, I sought to keep my weight down at all costs, but life gets busier and busier and when I would gain any weight, I would feel immediate shame and fear. It didn’t matter if it was just a little. I would grab my thighs, squeezing them behind my legs in the back to bear a thigh gap touted as ideal that I desired. I would look with jealousy and despair at women who had skinnier bodies, bigger breasts, thicker hair, daintier feet, larger hips, skinnier legs, and I would loath my own body.
It wasn’t until last summer, when I had gone ten months on a highly restrictive, gluten-free, dairy-free, corn-free, soy-free diet with all sorts of other limitations and shame judgements that I just broke. Something had to give. I couldn’t do it anymore. This couldn’t be reality; it was too much. I stopped. I abandoned it all. I gave into my need for nourishment and rebelled against the over-restriction with a ruthless vengeance. For the first time in my adult, life I lived this way. I chose to eat food for the sake of eating. I chose to abandon rules and abandon the shame. The problem was I didn’t know how to get rid of the shame. It was so deep. It was there, inside and relentless. Another side note to those of you that love health topics: I’m not saying that this way of eating is bad, not at all; hear what I am saying. I’m talking about my own intentions, beliefs and how this played a role in my life.
I did what I normally do, I journaled and I searched for books. I wanted to learn. I knew I wasn’t the only one who had gone through this and the solution here would not be another diet or another lifestyle touting the cure but only leaving me feeling less worthy than before. This had nothing to do with the external or what was healthy food. This was much deeper.
Along this journey, I read a lot of amazing books and learned from a lot of incredible women and finally started realizing what I had been doing to my body my whole life. Our bodies are our partners for our entire lives, so many times, doing the thankless work and then facing the abuse of our thoughts and actions daily. I talked down to my body constantly, criticizing every square inch, while pushing it more and more. I would eat less, and do more, I would sleep less and drink more to shove down the feelings that continued to creep up. I expected more from my body than it could give and I hated it for not being in the form of another. As I began to become aware of this, I began to really grieve. It was hard to accept the pain I had put my body through but this also brought me to thought work.
When we, at some point accept the thoughts that are placed on us, we then own these thoughts as beliefs and do the work of the enemy on our own and to ourselves. Don Miguel Ruiz calls this domestication, and when we own the belief, we start to self-domesticate. NO longer does the outside world need to push the belief on us; we do the work ourselves, abusing ourselves with the lies that we allow to run our own belief systems and thus feelings and actions. Knowing this was both liberating and also incredibly sad and scary, as with all great moments of enlightenment I believe. To know I had the power to change it and yet know it would be such hard work to change the thinking, and I wouldn’t know what was in store for me in the end exactly, I was so scared. I knew that the forces of the lies of our planet to continue to influence my thought world were powerful, and unless I made a regular conscious effort, I would continue to be held down by the oppression of the thoughts that were pervasive and pushed upon me.
I am not going to be able to cover all that I think about this in one post, and I think that would be overwhelming and counterproductive; but I am doing my best to present to you a snapshot of it. I can’t give all of my story with proper account but I can give you some food for thought.
This is pervasive, this idea that our bodies are not enough and need to be changed.
But what if you were able to let go of this idea and see your body, for real, as absolutely beautiful. What if you realized the truth that not even the women in the magazines look like they do in the magazines, and what if you realized that they often hate their bodies too? What if you realized, from the perspective of your amazing body, how powerful your body is? What if you really saw the way you treated your body?
If you have kids and you thought of them treating their bodies the way you do with your thoughts and actions, how would that feel? Do you use exercise as punishment? Instead of actually enjoying food and listening to your body, giving it what it needs for each day and knowing that you won’t execute it perfectly; do you use food as punishment and reward? Do you use food to fuel your shame and to validate your worth? Do you use exercise to prove to yourself that you can be something or someone else?
Or do you move because you love to, and do things that are good for your body out of LOVE and regard and gratitude not requiring of your body conformity to some seemingly perfect unachievable standard? Do you realize that health is a state of physical and emotional being, and not about a weight or an image? Do you realize how much time and energy and pain the beliefs you’ve held about your body and the effort to change your body has cost you? Is it really worth it? That is time you could spend with those you love and doing what you love?
Do you struggle to feel worthy unless you’re all done up and at your ideal weight? And do you struggle with hating yourself for not looking like someone who you assume looks like you should look?
This week, I want you to just think about this. Start to digest and really become aware of what you think and how you use movement, food and other things that your body needs in your life. How you view these things and how you view your body.
There is not shame in this thinking, there is the power to release shame in becoming aware of this thinking. You don’t need to be ashamed of buying into lies that have been constantly fed to you since you were a child. Our world is saturated with lies that make our acceptance unattainable and keep us in utter despair. It is not your fault that you believed the lies, but becoming aware that they are lies, gives you the opportunity to examine what it is you believe because of the lies, and how those beliefs have affected your life and your happiness. It also give you the opportunity to realize that you can move toward choosing what to believe.
Your body is an incredible blessing. Many people don’t realize this or start to love their bodies until they learn they are near death, and even then does the thought process actually change? It is active work and so very worth it. You are blessed by your unique body. No matter what it looks like.
Also, weather you are 100lb or 400lb or somewhere above or below or in between, you were fed lies and you don’t need to feel shame for not being whatever enough to feel justified in your feelings and beliefs. There are so many lies that there are even lies out there that discriminate as to who is “allowed” to hate their body and who is not, no joke.
Let me give you an example; I follow an Instagram account of an amazing woman coach that is incredibly inspiring. She’s on a mission in her journey healing from disordered eating to help women to accept their bodies; and she has actually faced adversity on her account with women telling her she’s not fat enough to talk about accepting her body. That she’s skinny and thus she doesn’t have the right to talk about this. This is for real!
This shocked me at first but then I realized that I had previously a paradigm similar to this for a long time. I thought that if someone had a body characteristic which I wished I had, that they didn’t have the right to feel the way I felt. If you’re thinking this is a joke, it’s not. Women have shame in feeling a way that they’ve been told or received messages that they don’t have the right to struggle with or other bodily shame. They hate their bodies, and yet it’s not acceptable to others for them to feel this way, so they hold it in and hide their shame, from the world and even try to hide it from themselves.
Women you see as the pretty girls have shame of being too short or too tall or too flat or too whatever or not enough whatever. We have all been fed the lies and drank the tea, and it looks different depending on your life and how you see your body, but we ALL have pain from our experiences with body shame. Don’t be as naïve as I was (or release yourself from this), thinking only certain people have the right to believe the lies about their unworthiness. None of us want to believe the lies and although they’re not helpful, causing even more shame just for the feelings is the opposite of progress here.
It is true that our society sends a great deal of messages to women that being fat is unacceptable; that being fat is not beautiful, and thus I can understand that the fatter one physically feels in their body, the more they may feel unloved and the less they believe someone skinnier has the right to feel this way as well. I know there is a lot more to it but my point here, is that there are more messages than just that about our value lying in being fat or skinny and that all of them are lies. There are messages covering everyone to make sure that all types of people feel unworthy of love and acceptance. To make sure all people can feel like they can’t possibly be enough.
This week, think about what lies are pervasive in your life.
What thoughts do you have about your body? No matter what it is, what thoughts about your body control your thoughts of your worthiness and lovability. What about your body do you feel shame? What about your body do you loath? What do you wish you could change?
What would you like to feel about your body?
,What about your body have you believed that if you changed this part of your body, you would be enough?
Can you recall a time when you made a change, or reached a goal and still felt the emptiness? Have you experienced a compounded amount of shame and hopelessness at the completion of a goal of changing your appearance? Have you felt imposter syndrome and total burn out; like it’s not sustainable?
What would it feel like to love your body? What would it feel like if you no longer thought that your body needed to be anything different than it is? What would you be able to focus on more fully? What would your sex life be like if you didn’t have any shame about your body? What would it feel like to move with this new found freedom?
If you didn’t use food and exercise as punishment, how would you move? Would you dance? Would you run? Would you play with your kids? If you could enjoy food while you connect with loved ones, without obsessing over the calories or the nutrients or other food rules? What if you were free to actually feel the way you’ve always wanted about your body?
What if you digested the idea that all of this is in the pursuit of loving yourself and feeling worthy, and knowing that having the thought that you need to change your body is the opposite of loving and accepting yourself. We can only love our bodies and show them that they are worthy, by pursuing autonomy within our bodies. A unity with body and mind, where we cherish what we have. Where we look at our bodies with wonder and awe and gratitude and we imperfectly move forward with unity, loving ourselves and those around us as we only can when we know we are enough.
I will go more into this topic in the near future, but wanted to plant these seeds. Try writing about this and letting it sink in. See what fears come up and write them down. Disarm their power by acknowledging them and really dissecting them.
If you would like some reading on the topic, there are several books I have thoroughly enjoyed, but I will start with two here. One is called Eating In The Light Of The Moon by Arika Rapson. It is a beautiful collection of stories and wisdom which will shift your paradigm and help you to see the power you hold. The other is Body Kindness by Rebecca Stritchfield, and this one has incredibly powerful but quick truths and immediate action steps for each chapter.
There is a documentary called EMBRACE which is one of my all time favorites and the perfect visual of what I’m talking about here.
Mary’s Cup of Tea is a great instagram account to follow if you have an eating disorder which you’re trying to recover from or struggle deeply with accepting your body in general. I just adore her pure and authentic heart and inspiring message.
Until we stop trying to change our bodies, we cannot really love our bodies. This doesn’t mean we can’t love working out, eating a certain way, or getting our hair done. This doesn’t mean we can’t love fashion or dressing up. This means that our value is not tied to an image we are trying to present that is different from ourselves. This means that when we wake up in the morning with no makeup on, no Spanx, no hair done or fashion adorned; we can learn to look in the mirror with unconditional love. Without a to do list of things we should fix and a gut filled with shame and fear.
This means that you can start to be grateful for the vessel you have been given and understand that this body is your ally and wants to enjoy life with you. There has been no more empowering and yet challenging experience than learning to sit down in the vulnerability of my physical body, and learn to love and embrace this body AND to lean into the role of becoming the Ally to my body as well.
Your body was beautiful from the moment you were born sunshine. You can and will learn to embrace your body as your ally and enough and I’m here to help you. You’re not alone.
I hope you soak in these ideas this week and digest it in a meaningful way. Until next time,
Holly Ann Kasper
The Radical Imperfectionist
