When you’re in the soup of diet culture, believing your (allegedly unlovable, misshapen, wrong) body is all that you are, loving it can seem so far away it feels surreal.
Learning to detach our worth from our appearance doesn’t require that we actively love every inch of ourselves. It would be disingenuous and harmful to proclaim that feeling worthy of love, respect, and belonging can only happen once you love every inch of your body. But, maybe, we could get to a place where we all realize, with every waking moment and throughout every single interaction, we are more than our bodies (easy to say we know this, but how often are you on the receiving end of judgments about your ability to perform at work because of your gender presentation, for example? How often do you make assumptions about someone's strength or stamina because of their body size?).
When working with body image clients, one of the first things I invite them to do is to examine the language they use to describe their bodies. It is often illuminating how potent that vitriol can be.
Is it any wonder self-love feels far away when the script we play is a constant stream of, “gross,” “sluggish,” “lazy,” “flaky,” “undisciplined,” and the like?
