With society almost solely judging people by their weight, it is not easy to feel great with a body that doesn’t hold up to the standards that the fashion and beauty industries portray. It is therefor not surprising that the number of people being ashamed of their appearance and hating their bodies is constantly on the rise.
Chances are you, your family members or friends go from one diet to the next, desperately hoping to find the magic solution for immediate weight loss. We all critique certain body parts and wish to be taller, slimmer, prettier and just plain better.
This disconnection from our bodies leads to misery, sadness and an overall feeling of failure and lack of self-control. I know what I am talking about. I used
to hate the body I was born with. My upper arms were too big, I was too short, my nose too broad and my legs too sturdy. I turned against myself and was at war with my body for most of my life. At the age of 10, I developed an eating disorder and almost died because of it. Sadly, my story is far from being an exception.
However, it does not have to be that way. There are simple ways for us to radically change our body image and there is hope for all of us to fall in love with ourselves by embracing our perfect body in its glorious imperfection.
In this post, I’d like to share a few killer ideas with you.
1. Let Go of Toxic Relationships
One of the best ways to instantly improve your self-esteem and your body image is to surround yourself with family and friends who appreciate you for the person you are and not the size of your jeans. Real friends and genuine family members will never even think about reducing your worthiness as a person to your weight, height or other measurements. Use your common sense to sort through the people that surround you and only, and I would like to repeat myself, only give those whose values are truly aligned with yours the gift of remaining in your close circle of trusted allies.
2. Throw away your scale
In today’s world it’s normal to have a scale in your bathroom, isn’t it? It’s even normal to weigh yourself every morning. However, when you come to a point where the number on the scale determines whether your day will be a great one or a horrible one or whether you have been a good person or a bad person, it is time to throw the scale away. Don’t let this little appliance give you either a false sense of control or a way of terrorizing you. Don’t let a thing have such an enormous power over you and your life. Do you really believe that you are just a number? If so, you should really make a reality check.
3. Stop engaging in fat talk
Fat talk is easy, fun and it is such a sociable thing to do, isn’t it? Everybody does it and by now it has morphed into a perfectly normal and socially accepted form of connecting with others. It is great to have a friend tell you that no, you are not as fat as you think you are and no, you don’t have to go on yet another diet, isn’t it?
Yes, but this constant talk about weight, the regular comparisons and the tendency to put yourself down is doing so much more harm than good. It’s destroying your self-esteem, your sense of worthiness and, in my opinion, even your intelligence. I am quite certain that you can find other, deeper, more important topics to talk about with your friends and family than kilos, pounds or food groups.
4. Be a role model
Many children grow up with parents or other role models who are always on a diet. My parents never failed to mention that “starting tomorrow, we won’t eat anything anymore” after we had celebrated a delicious dinner at a restaurant. Sentences like these, as innocent as they may seem in your own mind, can and will influence others on a deeper level than you can imagine.
So, instead of demonizing food and its glorious taste, be a role model and show gratefulness for all the different flavors we’re blessed to be able to enjoy.
5. Ask yourself what really matters
As I went through my many horrific years of being eating disordered, I could only focus on calories, exercise and the abuse of laxatives. Despite my many interests in history, languages, traveling, politics and more, most of my energy was wasted on superficial topics that brought me nothing but grief.
If you’re caught in the same vicious circle of dieting, then give yourself a break or even an intervention and ask yourself: does this really matter? Does having a six-pack or a certain number on the scale really add any value to my life, my relationships or even my career? Am I wasting my time, energy and intelligence by focusing on appearances instead of investing in my whole self?
If you dig deep, you’ll soon come to the conclusion that, yes, you are wasting your time and the things that really matter have nothing to do to with the circumference of your thighs.
6. Make the sane choices
With all the messages that the media is feeding us, it’s easy to forget that we have our own brain. Yes, I really wrote that sentence. We believe that we can lose 15 pounds in five days if we only buy this magazine. We believe that we will have a complete body transformation if we only buy this DVD. We even believe that if we drink a certain shake, we’ll shrink two sizes within a week.
Do we ever stop and ask ourselves what it is we’re buying into? Do we ever consider that those messages are nothing but lies? Yes, but only after we’ve unsuccessfully tried the “magic” pills and the “miraculous” diet plan.
It’s time that we, as women and men, come back to a place of making sane choices. We all know what is good for us. We all know which foods will make us gain weight and which will keep us healthy. We all know what our bodies need, but we ignore our own awareness far too often.
I am challenging you to sit down, dig deep and let go of all the false hopes that the advertisements sell you. I know, I just know, that you will find the right balance of eating, exercising and living within yourself. You just have to let the knowledge in.
Staying sane in a world that is obsessed about sizes, inches and weight loss is not easy, but I know that you, yes you, are able to do it. I know that if you try, you’ll be able to uncover your true self-worth and you’ll realize that it has nothing to do with your weight.
Stay healthy. Stay active. Stay sane.
Featured photo credit: via Shutterstock
You so nicely described the whole problem right in the introduction…
“desperately hoping to find the magic solution for immediate weight loss”
…and that is *exactly* the problem. How about instead of jumping on every single new diet you hear about from the informercials and morning news people take their health into their own hands and do basic research about the *causes* for their fat ass instead of just looking for the magic bullet to get around the problem or to cover it up.
The idiots who refuse to learn about their own health and then cry and whine about how they’re so misunderstood and their weight isn’t their own fault, the same ones who would rather listen to every other self proclaimed expert than educate themselves, same ones who would rather spend thousands of dollars a year on some new fad hip new diet instead of spending ten times less money on buying quality food, those people have no right to complain whatsoever.
And of course the moment one starts going poor you boo hoo, is the moment when one is giving the ignorant person excuses to continue being ignorant. This is by no means meant to come off as being an attack on you, but I just cant help but feel like the vast majority of the people who complain about being fat while not using their own head to fix the problem are just a bit… stupid…
Hi Michael, thanks so much for your comment and I agree with you, wholeheartedly. It’s often laziness, but also a lot of false information. We’re bombarded with these media messages and even if we don’t completely realize it, our subconscious mind is picking it all up. So, I believe that it is all about freeing yourself and, like I wrote, stopping to buy into this BS and instead use your own power. It’s always all up to the person. Yes, there are extremely difficult circumstances and disorders, which make things a whole lot more difficult. But that’s for another post and another discussion. Most people don’t have a disorder and can take their life back in their own hands if they educate themselves and really want to make a change.
It’s great that you’re an anorexia survivor, but it’s not okay saying people should let go of all judgements and throw away scales to feel good. If “overweight” (last time I checked, above 40% of the American population was obese ?), LEARN to exercise and LEARN to eat healthy, do NOT learn to live with it.
If too skinny, eat more.
Body recomposition is calories in vs calories out. Calories = protein/carbs/fats. If gaining, eat less, if losing, eat more.
This looks like a “fat ? ugly ? too stupid to do anything about it ? screw it all, be happy”. Please, don’ do that.
Vlad, while I agree with the first part of your comment, the second part, “body recomposition is calories in vs calories out” could not be farther from the truth. I’m not saying that the quantity of the food isn’t important as I think you are suggesting when you say that, but if it would all be simply about calories, rather than what the food is, then one would be able to eat the 130-200 teaspoons of sugar daily to get the required 2000-3000 “calorie needs” and all would be good. But of course you wouldn’t argue that that’s a quick path to killing yourself.
So to slightly correct your comment, it’s not a simple “eat less/eat more” but rather look at what you eat. Getting fat? Look at what you eat. The “healthy” oatmeal, whole grains (which aren’t better, just less harmful), fat free milk (white water with some carbs in it), and a bunch of other crap that most people start their days with just fattens you up and makes you hungry 2 hours later. Then for the rest of the day what do those people eat? Carbs carbs and more carbs in form of corn, soy, potatoes, wheat, other grains… and then at the end of the day they’re still hungry, regardless wether they’ve eaten 10 pounds of food, or were starving themselves and counting calories.
Of course if you’re eating real food (ie what humans evolved to eat), and not what only birds can thrive on (grains grains and more grains), if you’re eating good quality meats, eating vegetables, some fruit etc, then it’s almost impossible to get fat, unless you’re completely overkilling your food intake on purpose or because of some some psychological issue.
Great points, Michael. It all comes down to one thing: educating yourself and then acting upon it. It’s simple, maybe not always easy, but simple. However, I’d also say that having a balanced diet that contains chocolate and foods like that is crucial and a big part of being healthy. It’s all about the balance.
Well, you have to be careful using the word “balanced”. If you’re looking at health from an evolutionary standpoint, i.e. what kind of a diet got people to where they are today after hundreds of thousands of years, as opposed to the foods that were invented in the last couple thousand, or even couple centuries or decades. Then arguably there is no real health benefit from things like chocolate, ice cream etc. Not to say they’re necessarily bad for you, but if they were a requirement for being healthy then people would have died off thousands of times over before those foods were invented.
Of course I am by no means going on about how foods like that are evil and one should never eat them etc etc – I myself enjoy a little bit of chocolate once a week, or perhaps some cake and ice cream every few weeks etc – but thats the key point there – I enjoy those things once in a while. What I’ve seen with most people that follow the “everything in moderation/balance” methodology is that “in moderation” they eat ice cream every day, “in moderation” they drink a couple cans of Coke every day, “in moderation” they eat pizza, bread and pasta every other day – and then when you look at their diet as a whole it turns out that 90% of it is crap that they consume every single day while being under the impression that all it’s all good and healthy because they didn’t eat 5 gallons of ice cream at once but instead ate a gallon of ice cream, 6 slices of bread and 2 servings of pasta with some cake in addition to tea with 4 tea spoons of sugar in it :p
Great points, Michael. Again, it’s all about using your brains and not lying to yourself.
Hi Vlad, that’s not what I meant at all. But judgement doesn’t help anyone and, in fact, it’s proven that shaming people only causes the opposite. You can lose weight without a stupid scale. In fact, you won’t ever have a healthy body and weight if you don’t come to a place of being attune to your body. If you always rely on outside information and never actually connect with your body, your not going to have long-term effects.
Being obese is not the answer, but having a relationship with your body is and that most certainly doesn’t come from being obsessed with the number on your scale.
Fantastic post Anne-Sophie. I think your advice to throw away the scale is wonderful for an array of reasons but primarily for this fact – a number on a scale, which fluctuates at various times in a day and month, does not tell you whether or not you are healthy. It only tells you that you are few numbers heavier or lighter than you were the last time you jumped on the scale. All the naturally thin people I know couldn’t tell you how much they weighed because they never check. Why? Because they have a healthy relationship with food and their bodies.
Thanks again for a fabulous post!