Changing the Future of Body Image
What’s your earliest memory of your own personal first body shaming? When I was in 4th grade the skinniest girl in the class asked me and another friend what we weighed. She was naturally lean like many typical children’s bodies, while the other friend and I were on the brink of being chubby 10 year olds. She told us she weighed 75 pounds. And while the other friend admitted to weighing 107 pounds, I refused to tell her I weighed 99 pounds.
As adults it’s easy to think “kids have no concept of weight, body image, or negative self talk”, but I assure you in that moment I felt SHAME. I felt fat, less than, and unaccepted. This would be my self talk and image of my body for the next ten-ish years.
How sad would it make you to hear your elementary aged child tell you that she/he is fat, unworthy, and needs to go on an extreme diet to find worth and acceptance by the world? In a German research study(1) of 7000 teens ages 11-17, psychologists found that nearly half of normal weight teens reported that they thought they were too fat. Similar surveys taken in the United States have shown the same trends.
So how do we change this epidemic and move toward body positive confidence? Modeling. No not the super type where body image is all and everything. The type of modeling where people see and mirror us. The type that OUR CHILDREN see and mirror. It may seem impossible to change when we have been hating on our bodies for so long that it has become subconscious. But truly, beautiful friend, it is extremely black and white. Meditate on that. It is extremely black and white. You either focus on the good or the bad. You either pressure yourself to be perfect or you allow grace and acceptance for what you are doing to get yourself healthy. And as for modeling for those little eyes and ears that are always watching and listening, here’s are some essential habits to adopt:
Never put down your body. Period.
Embrace the amazingness of your body, no matter what your image of yourself is. Your heart has never stopped beating. Your lungs have never stopped breathing. That in itself is amazing.
Compliment yourself in front of your children, even if you don’t believe it, speak affirmations of yourself. When you tell yourself you love your hips and you love your effort, and you banish the hate of your love handles and the struggle to drink enough water, you will believe what you’re telling yourself. Black and white, friend.
Compliment your children for their kindness, beauty, compassion, energy, play, etc.
Stop dieting!
I repeat: STOP DIETING. If your short term weight loss strategy isn’t sustainable, don’t even start it. Not only does it wreck your metabolism and plummet your confidence in healthy eating, but it MODELS that you need to pay lots of money and go to extreme measures to get the perfect body.
Eat more veggies, drink more water, catch more zzz’s, and stop eating processed, prepackaged foods (even if marketed as healthy, they contain higher sodium, preservatives, fats, and sugars than real, whole, alive food.)
I could go on and on about the dieting aspect, but that is another blog post for another day. But, by adopting positive habits about our own body image and self-talk we will teach our children, the next generation, just by modeling, how to love their amazing, beautiful bodies. And when we can love our own bodies, then we can love others’ bodies as they are, judgement free to hopefully create a ripple effect through the generations until maybe one day there will be a world where no young children place their worth in what a scale says.
References
Parker-Pope, T. (2008, June 23). Many Normal-Weight Teens Feel Fat. Retrieved from well.blogs.nytimes.com