You don't have to love your body, but you can learn to respect it.
If I’m being honest, I don’t love my body. I wish some parts were smaller, some bigger; some softer, some harder. I’ve had stretch marks since puberty & I don’t find them beautiful. I have lumps, bumps, dimples, & I don’t consider them honour-badges of a life well lived. My skin is loosening. My muscles are diminishing.
My body is unimpressive and that can be hard to live with in a body-obsessed world.
So no, I don’t “love” my body. But I’ve awakened to respecting the hell out of it.
The human body is a goddamn marvel. An incredible biological design perfected in minuscule increments, generation over generation, for millennia. It adapts nimbly to the inputs you provide (food, movement, lifestyle), and forgives and course-corrects when you inevitably fck up.
The technology of the body is some of the most elegant ever created. And we were just handed it, at birth! Given this impossibly gorgeous gift to do with what we please.
And what did we do with it?
Well I don’t know about you, but I treated mine like a piece of shit for literal decades. I bossed it around and abused it and manipulated it. All day, every day for thirty-plus years. Just fighting, fighting, fighting.
Constantly battling this perfect thing that was given to me.
Every year of my teens, twenties and thirties was spent trying to transform my body into something “better,” when it was perfect, right out of the box.
And no matter what abuse I threw at my body, it obediently took in my ignorant inputs and tried its best to deliver the results I was maniacal about forcing.
It breaks my heart to think of how hard my body worked to make me happy.
And I never was.
So while I can say with great honesty that, no, I do not have the body of an Instagram model, I can also say with total sincerity that IT DOESN’T FCKING MATTER. My body is amazing and I respect it with all of my heart. I didn’t do anything to deserve the loyalty and grace my body has shown me. Just another reason I’ve grown to respect it so.
It’s not easy, but you CAN learn to do the same; I promise you can.
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