All tagged body image

Love your body in 4 easy steps

As Body Positivity Month rolls on, I want to talk about how to become more positive about your body. It’s taken me a while to get to a place of peace with my body and I’m going to share the four steps I took to learn to love my body. That being said, remember that this is a journey and not a destination. You’re not going to go through the steps and feel instantly better but, if you keep practicing, it’ll work out.

I’m annoyed.

I have been searching for months, years really, trying to find a website that has pictures of folks our age in the buff. It would seem like simple task but alas I find myself empty handed. Oh sure I’ve found many images of people 18-30 in various states of undress, but they were either shot in 1940 or they were straight up porn, even then, I could only find images of white people.

Could it be that in the world of limitless information at our fingertips that we have no record of body development to which we can compare our ever-changing bodies? A metric that is current, that also happens to be all-inclusive. Sadly, It seems so.

One of the biggest goals for most people our age is to feel “normal.” We find our cliques, and socialize each other in an attempt to make ourselves more “normal.” The problem is that normal is relative and without a directory of normalcies we create our own. The ones we create are often vastly different from reality and are often informed by media. Media, as we know, is morbidly disproportionate in terms if representing normal people, both physically and mentally. Media is highly prejudiced for race, age, economic level, religion, social norms, sexual orientation, gender and for everything else to which one can be prejudiced.

The result of this is that we now have three generations of people who have no idea what it is that their body is supposed to be. These people have no idea of how they compare to one another, just how they compare to Victoria’s Secret models and Porn Stars. They have no sense of reality and no assurance that who they are is acceptable.