When Your Relationship With Your Body Isn’t Good

Hi everyone

Happy new year peeps! I wish you an amazing 2019 filled with love and happiness 🙂

Today, I’m going to talk about body image and self-love and about those moments where your relationship with your body isn’t good.

Being able to love your body is a struggle these days, I think, in our society. We always get told to love ourself and our body and to accept the way we are, but when it comes down to it, we’re always being judged if we’re feeling happy about our body, feeling confident and accepting ourself and that’s just something that I find very confusing.

I recently saw a video of girls aged 6 to 18 talking about body image and how they feel about their body. There was one girl aged 11, she was absolutely gorgeous may I add, and she said that she sometimes doesn’t feel comfortable in her own skin and doesn’t even want to look in the mirror certain days. You could literally see the hurt in her eyes and that honestly broke my heart. 11 years is so young to be dealing with this kind of stuff. I remember when I was around that age, I didn’t really care that much about the way my body looked or what clothes I was wearing and it hurts to see such young, beautiful girls struggle with their body image, but on the other hand, I’m not too surprised these girls feel this way. I mean, look at our society, mainly social media. This is FILLED with negativity around different types of bodies and body image in general.

Our society aims to one certain body type and if you don’t look like that, you’re considered as less beautiful and less worthy. Look at how much it actually hurts and damages us. We see a little much of this and a little less of that on our body and we are disgusted by it. We hate it, just because it doesn’t look like that one body type society wants us to look like. This is so damaging.

I follow this girl called Megan on instagram (@bodyposipanda) and her page is all about body positivity and self-love. I’ve honestly learned a lot about these topics because of her and I really recommend following her.

This text below is something I wanted to post last year in July, but I eventually decided not to post it. Now that I read it again months later, I think this fits very well in today’s post, so here it is. This is me having trouble loving my body.

“”Loving your body isn’t always as easy

Today, I want to show you a part of the reality of the process of loving my body.

This is what I wrote in June 2018:

Sorry of this is a bit all over the place, but this is just the reality.

I’ve not been loving my body lately and I have no idea why. As some of you might know, I’ve been on this journey to become happier. One of the main topics I discuss is eating healthier. This is quite a difficult process, to be honest, but up to a few months ago, it went very well, until around June this year.

Unfortunately, in May – June, everything went wrong again. Well, not everything. I started eating worse again, but it was definitely not as bad as last year whatsoever. I think the reason why I started eating bad again is because exams were coming closer and during those times, I can have some trouble ‘controlling’ myself, definitely when it comes to food. After the exams, I obviously celebrated the end of the school year, and I did that in an unhealthy way. You know, the usual: lots of soda, sweets and unhealthy meals, like pizza and chips.

Another reason why I started eating worse again, is because of my mental health. May is always a very busy month when it comes to schoolwork and I couldn’t deal with it anymore. It was too much. There was way too much work that had to be done, but I didn’t have a lot of time. Now, even though I don’t have any hobbies or after school activities, I still had trouble squeezing even more work into my schedule, because I think that rest and relaxation is also important. I didn’t want to work 11 hours a day, that’s just so unhealthy.

I had a lot of school work to do (a few presentations, lots of tests and a big essay) and I was very stressed. I’m someone who eats when I’m sad or angry, and apparently also when I’m stressed, because I noticed here that I started eating a lot of crap again.

Even though I’ve been eating better this whole past year compared to a year ago, I don’t feel as good now as I did a few months ago. The frustrating thing about this is that I don’t even know why. It might be the food, but it could also be something else.

Because of all the crap I’ve been eating recently, I think I gained weight again and I just don’t like the way my body looks most of the time. One moment, when I look in the mirror, I really like the way I look, but only after a few minutes, I can almost hate what I see in the mirror and these thoughts are constantly changing. It’s weird, because I don’t know what I actually think of my body. Do I like it the way it is now or not? I don’t know.

At least once a day, when I look in the mirror, I’m doing these weird things like sucking in my stomach, thinking I’d look ‘better’ like that or standing a certain way in a certain angle where I look slimmer, thinking I look better that way than standing straight towards the mirror.

I feel like those weird thoughts are really a sign that my relationship with my body isn’t the best at the moment. I don’t really know what to do now, but I think the best thing to do now is to focus on other things so I forget about this a little.

This is what I have to say a few weeks later, in July 2018:

These past few weeks went a lot better. I’ve noticed that I think differently about my body. I look at my body in the mirror with a smile again and that feels so nice and relieving.

I just wanted to show the reality of the process of loving your body. It isn’t always easy, but that’s okay. Everyone has these kind of ‘down’ moments at some point, but there’s not much you can do about that, except for accepting that this is okay to happen. Just know that you’re not the only one going through something like this. As you can see, I’m dealing with the same shit. You’re human, which means that you for one, have feelings and so many different emotions and two, that you’re changing, both physically and mentally. Your interests change, your body changes, your opinions change, situations change, etc. Changing can be negative, but also positive. Your bad thoughts on your body will change, but that can take some time.

Please, don’t forget to take care of yourself, always.

sometimes it all gets a little too much, but you gotta realize that soon, the fog will clear up – Shawn Mendes

loving your body isn’t always as easy”””

I was so broken and vulnerable here. I’m doing a lot better now, though. Self-love and self-acceptance is so important, so please, take it seriously. Like I said in this post, it’s okay to struggle with loving your body and definitely don’t be ashamed about feeling this way. It isn’t always easy, but remember that you’re not the only one struggling. You’re never alone.

Please don’t forget that you are beautiful, you are worthy, you are loved, you are strong, you got this.

Thank you for letting me share this vulnerable and important post with you (I was honestly a bit nervous to post this, not gonna lie). What are your thoughts on body image in this society with all the negativity around it on social media?

My last post: quick throwback to 2018 + looking forward to 2019

Don’t forget to follow me on WordPress x

– Kiara –

☼