According to dosomething.org, 91% of American women are unhappy with their body and resort to dieting to achieve their ideal body. Ninety one percent!! It makes my heart ache with such sadness to read this statistic. How is it that we are so unhappy. Why?!
Why do we buy into an industry, a $60 billion dollar industry, that makes so much money as this statistic gets higher and higher. That is the diet industry’s job, to find the ways to knock you down. To say those exact words that make you feel like your body could be better. It’s not thin enough, tone enough, strong enough, muscular enough. You need to work harder, have more willpower, eat less, cut out “X’, workout more, no pain no gain.
We are brainwashed to believe that we must push our bodies to look as close as it can to this “ideal” that is portrayed through social media, television, the movie screens, on the runway and countless magazines. Do you know that only 5% of women posses the body type portrayed by Americans in media. FIVE percent!!!!!!
We are taught to have prejudice with how we see each other’s bodies. We are taught to judge, criticize and put down what is not “socially acceptable.” All the while fearing what judgement is made of your own body. What are the passing judgements that someone makes as you walk by them, is it good, is it bad? Are you ok? Are you enough?
My friend, I am here to tell you that the media has done far TOO good of a job talking to that dark part inside of you. The part of you that wants you to believe that you will not be enough until you look or weigh a certain amount. It is the part that will allow you to punish yourself with not eating enough, with not eating sugar, gluten, carbs in the hopes that your body will change. It is the part that will push you to work out too long, no matter how tired you are and for too many days. It is the part of you that makes you step on that scale every day to make sure you are staying in line.
My friend, my beautiful friend, this not love. This is fear. Fear that the media and diet industry has bestowed on you to believe in. That you must be a certain size, weight or body fat percentage to be happy, accepted and successful. When you start to see this, you start to feel that it is not the truth that is YOU. You see that honoring and loving the true you that lies within is what shines the light into the darkness that no longer has to take up space.
Loving a body that you have always been at war with may seem impossible. But what I can tell you, is the love is already inside of you. We are all born with it. It is the gift we have all be given. You just have to choose to see it, choose to feel it, choose to forgive yourself, and see the you that appears when you see her through the eyes of love.
