The trouble with body image

 

As this year comes to a close I have seen an uptick in recent stories about body image, encouraging women to love themselves just the way they are. I thought I would add my two cents to the discussion.

The trouble with body image is that it exists in a vacuum. What I mean by that is, when we women look at our body shape, our weight, the size of our hips or the tightness of our waistband, we are only looking at that aspect of our lives. We judge our weight as though we are robots, input=output, and break it down to one simple equation: skinny = enlightened, intelligent being, fat = defective. But the reality of how our bodies get to be the shape that they are is much more complex. Not only that, but dealing with body image implies that body image is our top priority. If it REALLY were our top priority, we would all be body builders and run the mile in under 6 minutes. The truth is that for most of us, unless we are actresses who won't get the part unless we weigh 120 pounds in the next 5 weeks, our priorities really lie elsewhere. And, wait for it ladies, THAT'S OK. THAT IS HOW IT SHOULD BE!!

With that in mind, I am doing an inventory of just exactly how I came to look the way I do. An honest interpretation of my life as a whole and how it relates to my shape. I am finding that as I do this, the self-loathing leaves and a kind-hearted and even proud approach to my body begins to take over:

• I was born this way. My fat distribution, muscle shapes and position, and metabolism were set in the womb. Period. I am never going to have a flat butt. I remember my mother embarrassing me in front of my friend when I was a kid, telling my friend's mom, "Susan has always had an athletic behind." It is what it is, and there ain't no getting around it.
  

  
   

• I have had 5 children. That's FIVE, with an F. Do I really expect to look at my body and have the hips of a 14 year old? I paid for those wide hips with a combined 200 weeks of pain as they stretched out to their current position and safely cradled my babies. I paid for my large chest with over 3 years of lactating. I paid for each stretch mark and blob of cellulite. Even for those women who haven't had children, they have earned their body in other ways.
  

  
   

  Consider this hypothetical example: A woman earned her 5'5", 240 pound frame by enduring years of ridicule and abuse from an overbearing parent. She survived, and moved forward. She used food for comfort and love. So what? It's not the healthiest coping mechanism, but it's also not a reason to hate yourself. It was all she could do to get up every day and keep on going, but she did it. Whatever your body looks like, chances are you have worked hard to get where you are with the body you have, and no one can take that away from you. We need to stop seeing our weight as a sign of failure and start seeing it in the context of our whole life story.
  

 

• I STILL have 5 children. That takes up a pretty piece of time. Not to mention stress. In the self-critical world that lives in my head, if I were a real mother I would go for a 5 mile jog every morning before the children wake up. And of course I also make French crepes for breakfast, iron their underwear, and put little love notes with kissy stickers in their lunchboxes. All of us have our thing that we do. For me, it is nursing school right now. I don't have time to "work on myself" in the form of having a bodacious body. I am working on myself in other ways, as we all are. Just because we are not currently losing weight does not mean that we are not growing personally in other ways. Maybe there are not enough brain cells for all my nursing knowledge so my drug info is being stored now in my abdominal fat cells? Just a theory…
  

  
   

• Lets talk about stress in more detail for a minute. Bear with me, this is the nursing student in me. When we go through stress, our body releases increased levels of the hunger hormone, ghrelin. Thus, when we are stressed, we eat more. Then, we become stressed about eating more. So we release more hunger hormones. So we eat more. Lather, rinse, repeat. Now, this is not an excuse for any of us to just eat uncontrollably when we are stressed, but it does shed light on why we "fail" at our diets often. Because we are stressed, often. It's not a character flaw, it's life
  

  
   

So, as the new year approaches, I am choosing to approach my body in a different way. These are the not-nice things I say to myself, and what I am replacing them with this coming year. Yours may look different, but I encourage you to make your own list and use it every time you start getting down on yourself about your appearance:

Instead of saying:	I choose to say instead:
"Ugh, look at my hips. I can't believe I haven't lost my baby weight yet."	I earned these hips. I worked hard for them. I am the mother of all mothers.
My kids won't respect me because I am not skinny.	My kids have (literally) a soft place to fall. My kids respect me because I care for them like no one else can. Weight has nothing to do with it.
I have let myself go.	I have spent my limited time on things that matter much more than what number my scale says or what size jeans I am able to fit into.
People will think I am lazy or stupid if I am not skinny.	People are going to think what they are going to think. And in this case, they would be wrong. I am not lazy, or stupid, and my weight has NOTHING to do with either of these things.
I will be a better nurse and more confident if I am skinny.	OK, now you ARE being stupid. Who the heck ever told you that being skinny makes you anything? It just means you're skinny. What kind of nurse I will be is up to me. In fact, the more I concentrate on my studies and the less time I spend on my body, the better nurse I will be.
I am never going to lose weight.	There will be many times in life to reassess my priorities. If there comes a time when losing weight makes it back up high enough on the list to actually merit a piece of my 24 hour day, I will lose weight.

 

BE KIND TO YOURSELF.

CONSIDER YOUR PAST.

CONSIDER YOUR PRIORITIES.

LOVE YOUR BODY AS A PART OF WHO YOU ARE!