DEALING WITH SUMMER BODY INSECURITY
For many people, summer is a hard season for their relationships with their bodies. Season staples like pool/beach days, shorts, and crop tops can create abundant opportunities for insecurity and negative comparison. Not helping the matter are the many cleanses, diets, fitness programs, and other products diet culture tries to sell us which feed the message that we can all have a “perfect body” if we just put in the work.
So what can you do if negative thoughts/feelings about your body are interfering with your ability to enjoy summer? Keep reading for a few ideas.
A Disclaimer
What you won’t find in the remainder of this article are any tips or suggestions regarding how to change your body. For a deeper dive into why I don’t recommend or participate in efforts to change bodies, see this blog post.
I operate from the standpoint that there is no such thing as a perfect body. All bodies are good and worthy of respect, regardless of size, skin tone, gender presentation, or ability. I don’t believe that the solution to insecurity is to “fix” our bodies because there is nothing to be fixed. I believe instead that the work lies in learning to live fully and peacefully within the bodies that we currently have.
How to Cope
If we’re not going to try to change the way our bodies look, then what can we do to alleviate our struggles with body insecurity? Below I offer a few suggestions to consider.
Think critically about why you dislike your body. You weren’t born believing that something was wrong with the way your body looked. Rather, these are messages you picked up through living life. Rather than just accept these messages as fact/truth, we can think more critically about why we are so conditioned to dislike our bodies as they are and to strive to make them “better.”
Who stands to profit when we are dissatisfied with our bodies and think we need to change them? What systems of oppression are upheld when we maintain a constrictive definition of “health” or when we spend excessive time, money, and energy fixated on making our bodies look a certain way? To start exploring these ideas more deeply, see here, here, or here.
Asking ourselves these questions can help alleviate self-blame by redirecting our anger and frustration externally. Rather than feel like we are the problem for not fitting an unrealistic beauty standard, we can see that the broader systems and values of our society are the problem and that they need to change, not us.
Accept that uncomfortable thoughts/feelings might come up and live your life anyway. Permission to live your life does not come from ridding yourself of insecurity. It comes when you recognize that negative thoughts or feelings about your body might surface but that you do not have to allow them to prevent you from doing the things you want to do.
Say you love the beach but avoid going because you know you will feel insecure in a bathing suit. Don’t wait to go to the beach until you’re sure you’ll feel fully comfortable and confident – that day will likely never come for most of us.
Instead, go anyway and have a plan for what you will do to redirect if uncomfortable or insecure thoughts/feelings come up. For instance, you could plan to acknowledge the thought or feeling for what it is and then refocus without fighting it on something pleasant around you, like how the sun feels on your skin or the book you’re reading.
Set boundaries with people/content that feed negativity toward your body. Are there people in your life or on your social media that often make you feel badly about your body or how you look? You get to have a say about how, when, and in what ways you choose to engage with those people.
With social media, you can simply unfollow, silence, or block accounts/content that fire up your inner critic. With people in your life, you can set boundaries directly by asking them not to comment on your appearance or talk about things like diets or weight loss with you. You can also set boundaries indirectly if that feels safer or easier by changing the subject if something that doesn’t feel good comes up or by leaving the room temporarily (bathroom breaks are always a handy excuse!).
Appreciate what you can about your body. Our bodies are the vehicles through which we get to experience all of life. Though many of us have some hang-ups about how they look, it is undeniable that our bodies offer access to some pretty amazing stuff.
Different bodies have different abilities, but some examples might include the ability to see, hug a pet, dance, smell flowers, swim, listen to music, and so much more. Connecting to something you like about what your body can do can offer a helpful perspective shift away from negative thoughts about how it looks.
When to Seek Support
Negative relationships with our bodies can be complicated and deeply rooted. If you find that, in spite of your best efforts to live more peacefully using the above or other strategies, you still struggle with persistent, intense, or frequent negative thoughts/emotions toward your body, you may benefit from therapy to support your healing work. You deserve to enjoy life and do the things you want to do exactly as you are right now. If it’s hard to believe or embody this, contact me today to learn more about how I can help you get there.
