ON BODY: What Trying to Recover from an Eating Disorder has Taught me about the World

***NEWS FLASH***

It’s not natural to hate your body.

You don’t come out of the womb hating your body.

You don’t even know the act of how to hate your body until you become exposed to society, the media, etc. that are constantly sending subliminal messaging every where you look influencing you to change your body in some kind of way.

As a young, pure, child, you wouldn’t think that your stomach is problematically ‘un flat’ until you see a magazine cover telling you how you can flatten it. You wouldn’t spend thousands of dollars on makeup and acne creams unless you saw a product telling you how to quickly rid yourself of your ‘imperfections.’ You didn’t feel shame for your hunger until you couldn’t stick to the ‘healthy eats meals’ that the fitness influencers you follow promoted.

Throughout my (continual) journey of trying to heal my relationship with my body, I became frustrated with the constant reality of why it is so. fucking. hard. I refused to accept the fact that it must be my lack of willpower and strength being the reasons I continue to struggle.

Thankfully, over time, through therapy/the practice of awareness, my own research, and lots of conversations with badass women in my life whom I admire so much, I learned that the concept of hating your body is actually just a social conditioning. The fact that society has an issue with your thigh cellulite or your cravings for Doritos or your fluctuating weight is actually society’s problem, not yours. Your body does not exist to satisfy the aesthetic needs of society, your peers, your partner, your Instagram followers… anyone that isn’t fucking YOU. Read that again.

Your body exists to house the mind that will help you learn how to live out your bigger purpose on Earth. Your body exists to provide protection, warmth, to give hugs, to take you to the places where you will make the memories and meet the people and the things that will change your life and where you will change others.

Your body only exists to get you through this continual shit storm that we call life. It doesn't exist only to look a certain way. So take a deep breath, take a hold of your body, and all that it continues to do despite all that you put it through, and have some compassion for it. At least try to.

So next time you feel like you hate your body, or you catch yourself feeling ashamed for it, feeling the need to change it, getting frustrated that you can’t just be like one of these seemingly perfectly body positive activists you follow, take a deep breath, and actually be curious about why you 'hate' it. Don’t just accept that that’s how it is, how it will always be. Call the feeling out, and question it. Is it because it looks different than other peoples seem to? Is it because society doesn’t privilege the way that you look? Is living a life constantly trying to change your body from the natural state it wants to be in really causing you the happiness and peace that making all of these changes have promised you?

By learning (yes, learning, it is an active, continual process, don't panic if you do not become an expert on it the first few hundred tries) to worry less about how your body is perceived by society and more about how your body is successful and perfect simply because of all that it does for you, you are doing the right thing. As someone who is an avid rule follower, rejecting the rules society has laid out for me is really fucking hard. But hey, that’s okay! As one of my current bad ass female crushes Miss Glennon Doyle repeatedly says, we can do hard things. In dressing how I want to, learning how to eat what I want to and move when I want to, I am learning how to enjoy my life for me. By practicing self respect, self compassion, and self pride, you learn to take life back into your own hands. You’re a fucking revolution.

It is an active decision to make decisions in love towards yourself rather than for approval from others. It’s hard, especially if you are an inherent people pleasing perfectionist like myself, but once I realized that hey, trying to please the world is doing nothing but keeping me stuck in the same loop of dealing with the same shitty, self deprecating feelings day in and day out, I knew things needed to change.

Today, and everyday, despite how hard it is and despite the initial shame and discomfort that comes with doing something different, I choose to break the rules. I choose to take care of myself in the ways that only I know how, the ways that only I can with what I have, because I deserve that. And I hope you learn that you deserve that, too.