Learning to love your body when you really don’t is no easy task, and it’s not as simple as the body positivity movement can sometimes make it seem. Going from “I hate my body” to something more positive will take time and conscious effort. Here are a few small, concrete ways to start: The first step to changing how you feel about your body is committing to the change. You need to acknowledge that you have a negative relationship with your body and that you want to have a positive, healthy one. Tell yourself, I want to have a positive relationship with my body. And make sure you mean it! Most likely, it’s because you want other people to like you, and you believe looking a certain way will make you more loved and accepted. “We are sold this idea that looking a certain way will bring us approval, affection, love, respect, value, etc.,” Kara Loewentheil, J.D., a former women’s rights lawyer who now coaches women dealing with insecurity, tells mbg. “But the whole thing is a myth. Looking a certain way will not make you happy. Look at all the literal fashion models with drug addictions and eating disorders!” Before you can learn to love your body, you need to relinquish the idea that you wouldn’t feel sad, lonely, or rejected if you looked different. “Human life involves beauty and suffering for everyone,” Loewentheil explains. “The more you can really internalize this idea, the less attached you will be to meeting certain conventional beauty norms because you will understand that they will never deliver what you want. Peace and happiness have to come from inside.” This isn’t to say that size discrimination, racism, and ableism aren’t real—yes, unfortunately, these physical factors do affect how people treat us. But bending over backward to meet their impossible ideals will not help you feel better about yourself. Is your body the problem, or are the ideals the problem? Instead of continuing to try to fit into a system that pits you against your own body, what if you adopted a new way of thinking that designates you as valuable exactly the way you are? What if you stopped trying to appease others at your own expense? Try repeating this to yourself: I deserve to be loved and accepted in this exact body. I will no longer entertain people or messages that tell me otherwise. “It’s my job to make sure I’m filtering those things and that I’m being very mindful and proactive and putting up boundaries around myself,” sexuality doula and sex educator Ev’Yan Whitney tells mbg. “I get to choose which messages that I internalize, and I get to create boundaries around the people, places, and things that take me out of my body.” Sexologist Megan Stubbs, Ed.D., recommends curating your social media feed: “Look at the accounts you are following. Do they make you feel empowered? Delete and add new accounts as necessary because what you surround yourself with influences you, no matter how immune you may think you are to those images.” “The body is the physical expression of emotions, and this has nothing to do with how it looks or how old it is,” Darnell explains. “Once you are familiar with your body’s language (not body language), you are better able to know what it’s trying to tell you. Slowing down to hear your body’s messages is how you develop compassion—which is a type of love.” There are so many ways to get to know your body on a deeper level. For example, if you’ve got a uterus, try tracking your menstrual cycle in more detail. Consider trying something like a menstrual cup to manage your periods, since the process of inserting and removing a cup requires you to feel out your cervix with your fingers, see and feel your menstrual blood, and generally get intimate with your body. Or you might consider trying a form of exercise or movement that requires a lot of control of the body—belly dancing, weightlifting, or even yoga. One particularly powerful way of getting embodied is through doing a mindfulness exercise called a body scan. Breathe slowly in and out, close your eyes, and then focus your attention totally on the top of your head. What sensations are you feeling up there? Any tension? Tingles? Pain? After a few moments, move down to your face and do the same. Then to your neck. Then to your shoulders. Then your chest. And so on and so forth all the way down to your feet. Darnell’s suggestion: “Right now, where are you, what are you sitting on? Notice how it feels…hard, soft, cold, warm, damp, sticky, etc. What parts of your body is it connecting with? What are your feet doing right now? What about the inside of your cheek? This is how you tune into your body.” You’d be surprised how much getting to know your body better can make it so much easier to love. This is all about training your brain to associate your body with positive feelings. Make it a habit to shower your body with love, and it’ll start to feel natural and instinctual over time. Feed your senses, she recommends. Really engage with them. “That creates body connection, and that body connection helps disintegrate the body hate.” There are so many benefits of masturbation, so do it often. Treat yourself to good sex toys and indulgent self-pleasure rituals. When your body is a tool for orgasmic highs and rushes of oxytocin, it becomes a lot easier to love. She suggests trying different types of exercise, dancing, exploring intuitive eating, or trying a boudoir photo shoot. “There’s something about just letting our bodies move the way our bodies want to move, without judgment, without trying to do any choreography,” Whitney says. “It just feels really, really good, especially in this day and age where we’re so rigid with our bodies, with the way that we sit, with the way that we stand. There’s so much rigidity. Dancing for me, it just feels like I give my body permission to do what it wants to do, to show up the way it wants to show up, to feel and emote in a way that it wants to feel and emote.” Whitney leads sensual dance meditations on her Instagram, or she says you can always just put on a song that you know gets you moving. “Whatever comes up, however my body wants to move, I’m going to let it move,” she says. “I’m going to be very mindful in the dancing. Like I’m not going to just dance it out. I’m going to breathe. I’m going to ask myself, what emotions are coming up for me in this moment? As I move my arms like this, what emotion wants to be released? Or as I move my hips like this, what am I shaking loose?” Exercise is a natural way to increase energy, reduce stress, and keep our bodies healthy. But when we look at exercise as a weight loss or body-shaping tool, we turn something that’s nourishing into something that’s hurtful and even hateful toward our body. Exercise as a way to love your body—not as a way to change or fight it. Dress your body like it’s a piece of artwork. Be intentional, attentive, and expressive. If you’re financially able, treat yourself to a shopping spree and buy clothes that make you feel good and make your body feel good. When we dress our body intentionally, we’re treating it as something that’s worthy of attention and love. We send the message—to others and to ourselves—that this is a body that is loved. If you have a deep fear of being fat or believe there’s something wrong with being fat, you’re dealing with what’s known as fatphobia3. Fatphobia is the fear or hatred of fatness. It’s similar to homophobia (the fear or hatred of gay people), except the target is fat people. Ask yourself this: What’s wrong with being fat? Sure, being overweight is strongly linked to many significant health problems. So is stress. But you won’t see people having as strong of a reaction to the idea of being stressed as they do to the idea of being fat. Stressed people also don’t get discriminated against in the workplace4 or mistreated by their doctors5 in the same way fat people do. That’s all the product of fatphobia. It’s time to start getting over our fear of fatness. That means celebrating your fat body, supporting and empowering your fat friends, and calling out anti-fat comments from your peers. Undoing internalized fatphobia isn’t easy, of course. Here’s some reading material to help you out: The Body Is Not an Apology by Sonya Renee Taylor, Fat Activism by Charlotte Cooper, Body of Truth by Harriet Brown, and You Have the Right To Remain Fat by Virgie Tovar. The Instagram of sex therapist Sonalee Rashatwar, LCSW, M.Ed., (@thefatsextherapist) is also a great resource. You might also want to pinpoint the parts of your body that you don’t like to focus your positive affirmations on. For example, if you hate your thighs, you might try reciting to yourself: I love my thick thighs, or My thighs are strong and sensual. Importantly, however, don’t force love if it’s not there just yet. “Let go of having to love it,” Darnell says. “If you don’t get there, it will be another reason to beat yourself up. Stop piling on the shame. That may be too much, too radical, or damn near impossible for you at this stage in your evolution. Can you attempt to find a few things that you perhaps like instead? Maybe you have nice hands, or ankles, or pretty eyes, great shoulders, or amazing hair.” The intention behind it is key: “I’m going to take this photo to just connect with my body, to see myself with my own eyes, and to begin to process the feelings that come up for me when I look at myself. … I’m going to rewrite these scripts inside of my head that say that I’m not enough. I’m going to use these photos as proof that I am enough, that it is possible for me to be connected.” “If your thought is ‘my stomach is disgusting,’ it’s not believable to tell yourself your stomach is beautiful yet. But you can practice the thought: ‘This is a human stomach’ every time you look at it or whenever your brain starts complaining about it,” she explains. “The more you practice these kinds of neutral thought swaps, the easier they get—eventually they will become your default natural thoughts.” For people who struggle with body positivity, body neutrality can be surprisingly freeing. “I know that my body could never be inappropriate. If I walk around naked all the time, or wear a muumuu slit to the moon to show my big dimpled thighs, or let my tummy hang soft and low, it’s right. I am of nature. I have cycles in my body that reflect the cycles of day and night, of seasons, of the moon and the tides. My body is a gorgeous miracle.” With her warm, playful approach to coaching and facilitation, Kelly creates refreshingly candid spaces for processing and healing challenges around dating, sexuality, identity, body image, and relationships. She’s particularly enthusiastic about helping softhearted women get re-energized around the dating experience and find joy in the process of connecting with others. She believes relationships should be easy—and that, with room for self-reflection and the right toolkit, they can be. You can stay in the loop about her latest programs, gatherings, and other projects through her newsletter: kellygonsalves.com/newsletter
