Read on Twitter
So quarantine has got me thinking a lot about body image. My own body image and it’s evolution and lots of other things. So here we go with a thread bc I know I’m not alone on this one.
I can honestly say that from 7th grade until the past few months, my body image was pretty bad. It started with being teased for being “fat” in middle school which started a domino effect of me wearing big sweatshirts until I got to high school to cover up my stomach.
And in retrospect, I was on the heavier side because I hadn’t hit puberty yet which became obvious when I lost 20 lbs and grew like 5 inches my freshman year of high school but even then, I still felt very self-conscious in almost anything I wore.
Then once I was in high school I was motivated to work out and eat healthy which sounds like a good thing. But I was motivated by the idea of losing that laaaasst little bit of weight which really just resulted in me putting pressure on myself based on how my body looked.
Needless to say, losing weight had been on my mind all the time. Whenever I ate, whenever I ran. And when you start doing that it’s so hard to stop. I see this all the time in people I love too. In the “oh I shouldn’t have ice cream” or the “time for spring break bod” language.
Those are typically masked ways of saying that people are uncomfortable with how the look which is deeply sad when you notice how often those phrase are in day to day conversations.
It’s not that people want to feel like they always need to lose weight, but when you look to society, there is so much pressure to do so, and it permeates through so many aspects of people’s lives.
For me, my body imagine really didn’t start to improving until I learned about inuitive eating and started kick boxing (s/o to @sharla_boehlke for both). They changed the way I thought about eating and working out. I started listen to my bodies cues
on food which lead to me eating a pretty balanced diet without removing the “bad” foods that I still want to eat sometimes just for my own enjoyment. The release of pressure to follow a diet or eat health completely changed my mentality about food in a good way.
Then with kickboxing. I just felt genuinely good and strong and happy whenever I went and I let that be the motivation for me to work out. To be happy and healthy. As I did this, it became so much more enjoyable. I wasn’t worried about making my body look
A certain way, but I was just happy to be active because it made me physically and mentally feel great. So now, at age 22 I finally feel happy with how my body looks. I look at my body and think happily about how it serves me every single day. All of the
Things it allows me to do. That’s the way it should be. The craziest part is, my height and weight have been almost the exact same for the past 8 years, yet I wasn’t able to feel this good until now. That speaks volumes.
