I feel like I am doing "pretty alright" in the body-image area, and I want (and don't want) to talk about it. I'm not sure if this is the right platform, and I'm not sure exactly what I want to get across, but I've been feeling that I ought to write about this for awhile (hence this post being in my draft section is some form or another for several months) so here goes.
Maybe I should set some parameters first. I'm not looking for any sort of pity/sympathy, and I'm not fishing for compliments. I want to be honest and so I'll be writing a few things that I don't really talk about very often and outlining a few things about the way I see myself that not many people know. I've gotten more comfortable with talking about body image, so maybe I talk about it more than I think I do, but I don't think it's a super common topic of conversation for me. This post is going to be largely about physical appearance, which is odd considering that my journey away from hating my body has been largely one of de-emphasizing the way I look and concentrating more on an interesting thought life and fostering the fruit of the Spirit, which are way more important. It started with appearance though, so that's what I'll write about here.
I'm not really sure how to start, so I'll just say what people probably can guess: I, like nearly all women (and some men) that I know, had some fairly severe body image and self esteem issues growing up that I carried into adulthood. Basically: I used to hate my body, and now I don't, and I'll tell you how/why.
When I realized that something had to be done about the toxic way I viewed and talked to myself (lots of words like "fat", "ugly", "stupid", and "boring" were involved) I also realized that the way to change the way I felt/thought/spoke about my body was not to make my body smaller. Hating my body was not only pointless and unproductive, it was also extremely harmful. If I had such strong dislike for it at the size it was, losing weight wouldn't suddenly make me love it. The problem wasn't my body, it was the way I thought about and viewed it. That realization took a long time to come, and my initial efforts at body-acceptance were pretty much the same as my previous patterns of self loathing. I thought that if I only lost weight, or changed my hair, or wore make up correctly, but mostly if I changed my weight, that I would finally accept and like the way I looked. Of course, that didn't help me with how I looked at the moment.
After a long time of attempting and failing at diets and exercise methods that had the solitary goal of "get thin", I knew that it wasn't working and I had to do something else. It was hard to change what I thought about my body, so I took the tack of thinking about my body as little as possible. Whenever negative thoughts about they way I looked cropped up, I would turn my mind to something else entirely. I had been advised to replace negative thoughts with positive ones, but replacing "I'm ugly" with "I'm beautiful" felt like a giant lie and it was easier to switch from "I'm ugly" to "it looks like the floor needs vacuumed" or "it's time to get ready to go to work" or "where is my pencil" or anything else, as long as it wasn't about my body or my looks. This got surprisingly easy, and eventually I didn't really think much about my body much at all. I stopped looking in mirrors as much as I had before.
In the meantime, I had taken up yoga and was learning to enjoy the poses and the strength that comes with them. The focus of yoga isn't on being the best in the class or on looking the best, but on what the body can do and how you can gently push yourself to lift the limit on your abilities. The focus is on function and kindness and encouragement, not on looking good. The mirrors in the yoga studio were there to keep me from injuring myself with bad form, not for me, or anyone else, to judge how I looked.
Taking not-thinking-about-looks and yoga together meant that my mind shifted from thinking about and putting value in my appearance and put the emphasis on what I was capable of. I took a slow trip from "my body is fat and ugly" to "my body is a body" to "my body can get into increasingly difficult poses, and if I keep practicing I will keep getting better". Form to function. My legs can walk, my arms can lift, my hands can hold, my face shows my emotion, my belly helps me breathe deeply. It mattered less and less what I looked like and more what I did with the machine I live in.
That last sentence shows the next step I took: I am not my body; I live in my body. It is a machine (an extremely effective and amazing machine, really) and I am a soul. My value doesn't come from what I look like, or how good I am at physical activities. I had been looking at the outward appearance, but God looks at the heart.
Presently, I eat for enjoyment and to be healthy. I don't permit myself to feel guilty about what I eat. I understand that excessive bad food makes me lethargic and makes it more difficult to be active. I exercise in order to improve in things I love to do. I rock climb and bike and I continue to practice yoga. I work out so that I can be better at those things, and so that I can be healthy. I am gentler and kinder with myself, which enables me to push myself further. I wear clothes and make up that make me happy, I don't wear them to please others.
I'm not always good at this, as evidenced by my emphatically declaring "I just want to look nice!" to a friend of mine just the other day, or by sad mirror glaces when shopping with my much thinner friends or how I often react to compliments by laughing. I still have days where I slip back into negative self talk, and days that I just really want to be conventionally pretty. I sometimes catch myself worrying over what other people think of the way I look, and worrying that I don't look good enough or normal enough or any other "enough". However, it gets more and more simple and easy to stop a body hate spiral before it gets going. My body is a body, just like everyone else's. It carries me around and responds to what I put into it. I have a choice between working with what I have or wasting energy on hating it.
I still call myself chubby sometimes, but I usually mean it in an observational as opposed to a disparaging way. After all, I'm not even entirely sure where the line between pudgy and chubby and fat is, or what the hell "curvy" means, or why there seems to be a construct of body-image issues as the purview of a certain body type. When I call myself "chubby", I usually just mean that I am a large-ish size and therefore my high waisted jeans sometimes dig uncomfortably into my belly if I sit slouched for too long, not that I look down on myself or my looks. "Chubby" isn't a value statement, it's just an adjective.
I won't tell you that I think I'm gorgeous or that I never compare myself to other women or that I don't often suck in my belly or wish I had less back fat, because that wouldn't be true. Here's the truth: I am now, usually, indifferent to my looks. When I do consider my looks I usually come away thinking I look remarkably average, with the occasional pretty day and the occasional "what is happening, why do I look so weird" day. I don't mind it, though, and the time I don't spend on fretting over my appearance I get to spend on reading or figuring out what I can do instead of how I look or investing in relationships or conceivably anything else. If
I can take the energy I used to spend hating my appearance and put it
towards learning to be more kind, then I am doing alright.
To sum up: I stopped thinking harmful things about my looks and body by making an effort to stop thinking about my body altogether. Eventually I could think about it again, because my default thought pattern had changed to an ability focus rather than a looks focus. After all, how much do my looks really matter? Not very much, and that's okay. The human body is a truly remarkable machine, and I'm glad I have one and that it functions well and that I can climb and stretch and swim and it just keeps going. I want to encourage you to look at your body as just that: a body. Your arms are arms, your legs are legs, your torso is a torso, and that matters more than what they look like. Your body is a machine made of meat, and you get to be the spooky ghost that operates it.
