More Than a Body: Your Body Is an Instrument, Not an Ornament

Girls learn the most important thing about them is how they look. Boys learn the most important thing about girls is how they look. Girls look at themselves. Boys look at girls. Girls are held responsible for boys looking at them. Girls change how they look. Boys keep looking. The problem isn’t how girls look. The problem is how everyone looks at girls.

Positive body image isn’t believing your body looks good; it is knowing your body is good, regardless of how it looks.

Self-objectification occurs when people learn to view their own bodies from an outside perspective, which is a natural result of living in an environment where bodies are objectified.

We believe women are suffering not only because of the ways beauty is being defined; we are suffering because we are being defined by beauty. We are burdened with the task of looking beautiful and feeling beautiful (to others as well as to ourselves) because we live in a world that defines our value in terms of our physical appeal to others and defines our body image in terms of our physical appeal to ourselves. Being viewed as objects is the real root of our problem, not which beauty ideals are in vogue for female objects.

These out of reach body image mirages actually deter us from healthy behaviors like enjoyable exercise and balanced eating, and they become a major barrier to fitness.

When we are self-objectifying, our identities are split in two: the one living her life and the one watching and judging her.

When we live our lives in this perpetual state of body monitoring, we are living passively, being judged and consumed by ourselves and others - not as self-actualized humans actively making choices.

But self-care that is truly caring takes care of your whole self, not just your visible self. Self-objectification is not self-care.

Let’s imagine something better than beautiful for ourselves and everyone we love.

My body was never the problem; my perception of my body was the problem.

I lost 25 pounds in less than 2 months due to stress and grief over my brother’s death. Wow, the compliments I got, and the ‘how did you do it?

A key to this mental shift is going into exercise activities or fitness regimens with no assumptions about what effect they will have on weight, size, shape, cellulite, or body proportions. It can be difficult to shake the hope that our efforts to be active will shape our bodies in particular ways, but getting your mind off of those body ideal oases will pay off in the future as you pursue reachable, empowering goals instead of mirages.

positive body image isn’t believing your body looks good, it is knowing your body is good, regardless of how it looks.

Don’t decide what you want to weigh or how you want to look—decide how you want to feel, what you want to do, and what you want to experience along the way.

We all know that happy, fulfilling, lasting relationships—whether romantic or otherwise—aren’t guaranteed to those who find themselves in ideal-looking bodies. And we know chronic illness, disease, disability, and death do not skip over people who do all the right things and look all the right ways. We know our happiest times don’t always come when we look our “best” and our hardest times don’t always come when we look our “worst.

As adults, our imagined goals in life often include our goal bodies, and many of us can’t envision our happiest, most fulfilled future selves without also imagining ourselves looking different (“better”) from how we do now.

Rather than helping you feel temporarily good about your appearance, cultivating body image resilience can give you the ability to prioritize your own first-person perspective on your incredible body—regardless of how you look or how you or others feel about your looks.

When the “fixing” doesn’t do the trick or your flaws seem too overwhelming to even try to change them, you might simply sit it out. You hide by opting out of anything that would require being seen.

My purpose is to bring light into this world, not to decorate it.

Beauty doesn’t make you, so it can’t break you, either.

definition: Positive body image isn’t believing your body looks good; it is knowing your body is good, regardless of how it looks.

Difficult experiences and feelings about your body caused by objectification can work for you instead of against you.

When we keep attempting to fix an internal, mental problem with outside, physical solutions, those quick fixes will never really solve our problems, nor will they prepare us to respond effectively to future body image disruptions.

You hate your body instead of hating the expectation that your body fit a certain mold. You hate your weakness and lack of discipline instead of hating the profit-driven solutions that are designed to require a lifetime of purchases but still leave you short of perpetually out of reach ideals.

But experiencing and valuing yourself as a whole, embodied human means making sure you aren’t prioritizing validation from others above your own well-being, health, and happiness, and not prioritizing an external perspective of who you are.

Women are privileging an external view of their bodies over their own internal, first-person perspective. It’s as if we, as women, exist outside of ourselves—as if our bodies can be understood only through someone else’s eyes.

Women who feel positively about their bodies because of how they look often fall even harder into negative body image and shame when they no longer live up to the ideal, whether because of aging, illness, pregnancy, or any other cause. When your main source of confidence and validation isn’t producing the same results it used to, that loss stings.