I was recently reading a blog a close friend of mine had written on her own healthy journey. One little blurb she wrote really stuck out to me—
“The way to change my life and change my health is to choose every day what will make me healthy now. What’s the right decision today. Because – whenever I’m at that mythical me state where I think I’ll feel 100% better about how I look – I’ll still have to choose health every day.”
This got me thinking more more about that frequently used term “body positivity”. Body positivity is defined as the acceptance and appreciation of all body types. A really good and necessary concept in our world, but just how does one develop body positivity within oneself?
I think the key to that lies in the passage I shared from my friend’s blog post. Often times we give 5 or 6 steps to take to develop a positive body image. And don’t get me wrong, those are good key things to do. But it’s also about a bigger concept of making conscious decisions on a daily basis (even on a moment to moment basis!) of what will actually be healthy for me now. With that mindset, the behaviors of self-care and honoring my body will follow.
Is it honoring my body to restrict its intake? Or to binge and purge? As we shift our thoughts from how our body looks, to how to care for our body, we begin to develop a more positive place of care for ourselves.
That’s the key to body positivity for ourselves. It involves less of a fixation on loving our bodies, and much more of a fixation on caring for our bodies. So I think we could say body caring first and then body love follows.
