Has being an athlete made you love your body or hate it?
The DANGER of Focusing on Weight Loss
You've heard from me before about the dubious links between weight loss and health.
It's how we psychologically twist a need to be skinny or good looking into "self-care." It's also how we mix up "concern" with discrimination. But, sometimes, focusing on weight loss can be unsafe. .
The best example of this is...pregnancy.
Just because you were a size 2 once doesn't mean you should be there now.
I once was a size 2. Actually, if you go back far enough, I think I used to be a size 0-2 months.
Ba doom cha!
Seriously, though. This is the diet trap.
One time when you were "really really really good," you were able to be this size. This is your ideal size. It seems reasonable to you because you were there once. It's not like you want to look like OG Barbie or even like Taylor Swift, you just want to be this size again.
What to do when you feel crappy about your body.
Spring time is rampant with all sorts of "detoxes" and "cleanses" encouraging you to stress out about how your body looks. And, even though I like to think I'm immune to this nonsense, I'm not. Today, I found myself thinking WAAAAAY too much about my belly.
I'm a child of the 90s and during key developmental parts of my life, "midriff tops" were a super big deal. Can you say Hit me baby one more time? I've always been REALLY insecure about my belly.
I wanted to share what really works for me to get out of the body shaming funk so you, too, can stop the cycle:
The Mythology of One Size Fits All
One of the largest issues with weight discrimination (pun intended) is that people start to believe that they should all look one way.
To quote one of my favorite songs from my angsty teenage years, "These plastic molded seats had to be cast from someone's perfect ass, leaving the rest of us to squirm uncomfortably."
In other words, just because what we see in the media looks one way does not mean that the rest of us need to fit into that mold. That's just the way one person looks. It's not really necessary for us all to look that way.