Key Takeaways
- Change your thinking to functionality: Mindfully remind yourself everyday what your body is capable of doing – producing breath, walking, creating, healing – and not obsessing about how it looks on the outside.
- Mindful Unfollows: Take an inventory of the people/fostering accounts you follow for diet-culture notions or restoring regards to your body and unfollow them and follow a range of body-positive creators.
- If the positive mindset of positive affirmations seems false, use neutral affirmations such as: “My body is worthy of being cared for today, even if I don’t feel it.”
- Discover Joyful Movement: Ending punishment for eating. Find and do activities that make you feel good and stress-free whether it be dancing, walking or stretching.
- Dress for Today: Shed “Goal Clothes” and “deliberately” wear an outfit that feels good on your body and helps you to be happy in the moment.
Intro
So that I got up and said right away, I need to look bad, I need to look bad, I don’t even think about it anymore. Our bodies are often thought of as having a problem that needs to be solved instead of a vehicle that needs to be enjoyed, making it seem impossible to find peace. If this is how you feel every day, I’ve compiled the best and easiest ways to practice body positivity daily so that we can all take up a comfortable, confident life in our bodies.
Understanding Body Positivity in Our Daily Lives
For some time, I had a misconception about what body positivity is. I completely misunderstood it to mean that each day I wake up, see myself in the mirror and feel totally in love with my body. I think I had unrealistic expectations in this, and this only led me to failure.
Discussion of the simple times to practice body positivity, we must first be grounded with reality. Body positivity is not the same as trying to be positive; not the same as not having bad days. Rather, a radical commitment that we make every single day – to take care of our bodies, respect them, and honor them, no matter how the day starts on Tuesday morning. It’s a structure of acceptance.
Shifting the Focus from Appearance to Function
I think I’ve made one of my biggest transitions in my own life that I consciously worked on, and it’s been how much my body can versus looking the way it does. In self-hatred we see our bodies as objects to be looked-at by other people. I think it’s important to keep in mind that our bodies are instruments and not ornaments.
Here are some tips for how we can actively focus ourselves on the body’s functions on a day to day basis:
Reflect sensory responses: Rather than pay attention to how arms feel in a short sleeves shirt, acknowledge how warm is the sun on the skin or how cool is the breeze.
Honour physical stamina: Notice and thank your legs for taking you up stairs, or your back for carrying your groceries and the kids.
Honor internal processes: Mentallyifying appreciation to your digestive system that it took everything you ate for breakfast and changed it into energy; to your heart that is beating continuously; and to your lungs that are breathing without your being asked.
See how Creative Capabilities enable them to type, paint, cook or play an instrument – these are the things the hands enable to be done: A way of connecting the imagination of the mind with the real world.
These affirmations can happen frequently, removing the force of aesthetics, and creating a new relationship with our bodies, one that is filled with gratitude for being able to survive and move through the world on its back!
Curating a Body-Positive Environment
You can’t heal in the same environment that you got sick. If I indulge in media and feel bad about myself for hours a day, any affirmation in the world won’t help my self-esteem. The most important and easiest thing to do every day to become more positive about our bodies is to sometimes ruthlessly deconstruct what we let into our own minds. We take in the messages in our environment like sponges; we need the water we absorb to be clean, supportive and realistic.
Cleansing Your Social Media Feed
Presently if I launch the Instagram, I might so much as immediately acquire a pit in my abdomen. I was overwhelmed with heavily filtered photos, people glorifying crazy eating habits and stars getting impossible beauty treatments. I knew that I had to come to terms with the fact that I am the one that’s in control of this algorithm. The digital space is your digital home – you don’t need to let people in that make you feel shitty.
Spend 60 minutes this week going over your social media. If there’s anything that makes you feel bad about your body and/or you feel guilty about food, or compelled into some excessive exercising, unfollow/mute it. Switch out with body positive, fat positive, intuitive eating and self-compassion accounts. Follow people that look like you, and most importantly follow people that look different. It shows us a full and beautiful range of human bodies, and therefore normalises diversity and re-normalises what is supposedly “normal” or beautiful.
Surrounding Ourselves with Supportive People
It’s not just about the digital realm, it’s about the physical one as well. I had to put up quite a show of forcing my friend/ relatives to cooperate on diet talk or “fat talk”. Finding it hard to be body positive in a friend group who are united in body hate.
You can gently but firmly change the subject when conversations turn to weight loss or body bashing. I frequently say things such as “I am working on lowering my gaze on my body for now, can we talk about that book you were reading?” or “I have made a rule for myself to not comment on bodies, not even my own for now.” We create boundaries to safeguard peace and, in many ways, encourage others to step out of the rat-race of negative body talk without our explicitly communicating it.
Practical Morning Habits for Body Positivity
Starting our day the right way sets the tone for our whole day. The first thing I do is step on a scale or pinch my tummy in the mirror — what does that tell me if I’m proving to myself in the first step of doing more? To ensure that there are ways that people can be body positive every day, we must make radical changes to our morning routines and make sure that they are as kind and neutral as possible.
Affirmations That Actually Work
Many people roll their eyes when they make affirmations since they attempt to state something which the brain will not really accept. “Today – if it really is a bad body image day – when you look at the mirror and say ‘I am the most beautiful person in the world!’, it is going to sound like a lie.” It will not be accepted by your mind, and you will likely feel worse. Instead, bridging statements or neutral affirmations that resonate and feel grounded must be used.
Here are some believable, everyday and grounding affirmations that you can try:
“Today my body deserves to be cared for – just the way it is now.”
To deserve the respect he must not have to change his physical shape.
The thing about me that’s least interesting is my appearance.
Today I will feed my body since it requires nourishment to operate.
If I’m not in love with myself right now, so be it, but I will treat myself with kindness anyway.
Write these on sticky notes and hang these on the bathroom mirror. Brush your teeth while you’re reading them. The repetition then reconfigures the neural networks in our brains and bit by bit replaces the “critical” inner voice with a softer, more compassionate voice.
Dressing for Comfort and Joy, Not for Hiding
I had a part of my closet filled for years with what I instigated was “goal clothes,” which were two sizes smaller than my actual size, that I’d be dropping weight my entire life for. There was something quite loud and loud about those clothes on every morning, a visual reminder that I was “on failure mode.” One of the biggest liberated acts of body positivity I have had, was the elimination of those clothes!
That’s the outfit that we need to wear in our current life, at this very moment. Purchase garments that don’t dig into your waist or interfere with breathing. When we wear clothing that’s too tight, it is constantly telling our brains that it is physically uncomfortable, which in turn reminds us of our insecurities throughout the day.
Additionally, no longer wear clothes to conform or camouflage one’s body based on random fashion considerations. If you wish to opt for the bright shades, or stripes running horizontally or for a crop top, go ahead and wear it. Clothes should not be used for camouflage or punishment but as an expression of personality that doesn’t make you feel bad about them each day.
Navigating Negative Body Thoughts Throughout the Day
The temptation for negative thoughts will always be there regardless of the level of our morning ritual. This could be due to a terrible photo, a sudden vista in a shop window, or a pair of jeans that feel just a bit tight. The aim is not to stop these thinking processes, to reduce them to a minimum or to stop them completely; this is not possible. The aim is to lessen the time we spend on them.
The Power of Neutrality Over Forced Positivity
I do practice body neutrality when I feel like I am “supposed” to condemn my body in some way. When body-positivity seems out of the question, body-neutrality is the lifesaver. It’s just an acceptance of your body providing you the structure you need from point A to point B without any moral judgment.
When I see myself, my brain, or other part of me responds, “Your stomach looks terrible today,” I stop and neutralize the thought. I answer back to myself, ‘Come, this is the stomach, the stomach is only the organ which eats your food and protects your internal organs.’ Any moral judgments (good/bad; pretty/ugly) are removed from our body parts, thus the emotional sting of the criticism is neutralized. We pick up how to live with our bodies without assessing them all the time.
Reframing the Inner Critic
Our inner critic is the voice in us that copies what we heard from others when we were little or what we saw in the media. When that critical voice becomes loud, I take a CB approach: I make the voice an outside voice. I understand that the unkind words I say about myself aren’t really my beliefs but are an acquired behavior.
Ask yourself ‘would I say this exact word to my best friend or a small child?’ Just about the time, the answer is no, no, no. We are very hard on ourselves that we would not be on others. If you hear the critic speaking, interrrupt it with purpose. Reframe the thought. Say “I hate how big my thighs are” as “My thighs are strong, and they allow me to walk my dog in the park.” It requires an effort at first, but then becomes ingrained in your system as a defense against beating yourself up.
Moving and Nourishing Our Bodies with Love
Our society has become deeply complicit in diet culture and how it is relating to food and exercise. Its important for us to learn that our society has been indoctrinated to think of food as a reward, and the consequences of its ingestion as a punishment. To master simple actions in everyday life to embody body positivity, it’s time to rethink movement and nourishment as acts of self-love instead of means to manipulate a body.
Joyful Movement Instead of Punishing Exercise
I used to go the gym where I forced myself to run on the treadmill for an hour watching the calorie counter, and loathing every minute of it. I believed that in order to count it must hurt. This attitude will always lead to burn-out and will result in a high level of resentment towards our body.
We must move from “exercise” to “joyful movement.” Joyful movement is about asking my body “how do you want to move today?” Some days, it may want to go to a spin class or heavy lifting day and just sweat it out as it feels like empowerment.
Sometimes, the best way to go about moving is to take a leisurely 20-minute stretch while lying in the living room, gardening, or simply holding a dance party in the kitchen while cooking dinner. Don’t create stress, relieve it; movement should lessen it. As we break away from our focus on losing weight or reshaping our body, we can then experience the pure joy of movement with a boost of endorphins.
