Self-Compassion Practice: Cultivate self-compassion by acknowledging negative thoughts about your body and countering them with kind, positive affirmations.
Body Neutrality: Shift focus from appearance to functionality. Recognize your body’s capabilities, strengths, and non-aesthetic qualities.
Healthy Lifestyle Over Perfection: Embrace a balanced diet and regular physical activity for wellbeing, not for drastic body changes. Limit exposure to social media for comparison.
Professional Support: Seek help from a therapist or counselor specializing in body image issues to address underlying concerns and develop coping strategies.
Community Involvement: Join support groups or forums where sharing experiences with similar struggles can foster a sense of solidarity and encouragement.
Mindfulness and Meditation: Engage in mindfulness exercises to remain present and reduce negative self-talk focused on body dissatisfaction.
- Focus on Personal Values: Replace the emphasis on physical appearance with personal values and goals unrelated to your body, such as career achievements or educational endeavors.
Accepting one’s body
The first questions about one’s body, about physical appearance, generally come in the adolescent era; this period characterized by large physical and emotional changes It also triggers confrontation with friends, with the peer group. Pubertal development and body change activate a series of questions, of reflections on one’s body, normality, functioning, and comparison with others. Adolescence represents from this point of view a time of fragility, a time when the lack of acceptance, recognition and validation of one’s body appearance can affect self-esteem, socialization, and integration.
I don’t think there is a manual or strategy for accepting one’s body: those who love themselves looks at themselves affectionately and with tolerance, smiling even at what may be considered flaws.
Generally, we face the problem of acceptance of our bodies the moment we feel we have a defect, something different, something that does not fit the canons of reference for the culture in which one lives. In fact, the process of recognizing and accepting one’s body is a common process for everyone: the body changes and we need to take note of it.
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The environment in which one lives, the culture with which one is imbued from birth exerts great power over how one perceives oneself. Think for example of the standards of reference for thinness and overweight in different historical periods and cultures: what is beautiful or ugly, acceptable or to be rejected has changed over time and will change again.
Accepting one’s body means not only making defects and qualities one’s own, but also learning about it and live in harmony with all parts of our bodies. It also means getting in touch with more uncomfortable parts and coming to terms with the meaning and emotions these activate. I am referring in particular to to the most intimate parts, to the external and internal genitalia, but also to the breasts. The breast, for example, for women is a part that is certainly intimate but also extremely and immediately visible to others. The aesthetic canons that are proposed to us are of Beautiful perfect and prosperous breasts, as well as painted vulvas that are all the same. If we have these aesthetic canons as references, nothing is good!
Acceptance of one’s body is not a female prerogative, men also struggle to accept themselves in some peculiarities, think for example of baldness that arises even at a young age, penis size, height. just to name a few.
Beyond the image of perfection
It is important to consider that our physical fitness, appearance, beauty or otherwise, are the result of a series of factors that are only partly modifiable.
First of all. let’s start with genetics, from how the combination of genes coming from our parents amalgamated: this is a fact that is unlikely to be radically altered. The genetic aspect, constitutional is then integrated with the environment: healthy environment, varied and balanced healthy diet (which does not mean rigid and restrictive diet), physical activity, behavioral habits, and healthy lifestyle are tools in the service of well-being and not instruments of torture through which to subject and bend our bodies to make them perfect. These are the things we can modify if we feel the need, With the goal of getting better, to feel more in harmony with our bodies, not to be all the same and all necessarily perfect at the cost of suffering and hardship.
Instead, beauty lies precisely in theharmony with one’s own body, in feeling comfortable with who one is, flaws included. The defect, often understood as a lack (the lack of beauty, of perfection, of a function), can be read in the key of peculiarity, uniqueness, a characteristic that makes that person, a person equal in his or her diversity.
I think the point is to love yourself, to love yourself, and to take care of yourself even through taking care of the body, care not obsession with a perfect body. Activate at every age the habit of looking critically at what is offered to us; a critical sense that is not to criticize always and always, but Getting used to thinking, to developing careful observation, reasoned before absorbing what we see.
In summary, to learn to love one’s appearance can be helpful:
- Love and respect each other in diversity;
- Being aware that what we see and want to look like is not always authentic;
- taking care of oneself and one’s physical and psychological well-being, which is a good starting point for loving one’s body;
- remembering that wealth lies precisely in difference and uniqueness not stereotypy.
