Turn on the TV and flip the channel to MTV, VH1, E!, or any other network aimed at young people. Look at the girls' bodies in the commercials. Notice the perfect waist to hip ratios and the slender faces. Look at the girls' bodies in the scripted television shows. You are more than likely to see women with small waists, big butts, big boobs, and skinny legs. You'll see perfect hair and perfect makeup. It's no wonder that girls and women have body image issues in today's world. Women are constantly being bombarded with images of "perfection," though this image is usually unattainable.
Now turn your attention to the Internet: Tumblr, Twitter and Instagram. If you search the hashtag "body positive," you see thousands of photos of girls and women. All are different. Different shapes and sizes. Different races. Different walks of life. Each photo is unique, but all photos focus on one thing: body image.
All right. Now forget everything you know about body image. Forget the skinny models you see on TV and in magazines, forget the shapely girls you see on Tumblr and Twitter. What if we, as a society, ditched the idea of body image as a whole? What if we didn't care about whether your curves were as beautiful as someone else's slender frame? We would be better off.
We need to stop pushing the idea of body image. We need to stop teaching girls that the way their body looks is important. What we need to teach instead is that the way our bodies feel is much more important. Can you physically do everything you want to do?
If you want to climb a 14,000 foot mountain, nothing in your controllable power should stop you. You should train for the climb. You should gather up the necessary gear. You should feed and nourish your body with the essential nutrients. And then you should climb the mountain. When you reach the top, you should think, "Wow. My amazing body just carried me 14,000 feet in the air." It absolutely does not matter what shape or size or weight your body is, as long as you know it can carry you all the places you want to go in life, it is beautiful.
If you have a limitation that is stopping you from doing something physically, you should want to change that limitation. If you want to run a 5K but know you can't at the moment, you should work on your body until you can. Walk a mile a day. Then, when you can do that, work on walk/running. Then run a mile a day. Then run two miles a day. Before you know it, you'll be able to run a full 3.1 miles with no limitations. It doesn't matter if it took you five weeks or five months, the fact that you trained your body and you reached your goal is astonishing.
If our society stopped caring about outer body image, we would be healthier physically and mentally. Women would learn to be proud of their bodies not for the way it looks but rather for the way it carries them through their lives. They would understand that their bodies are beautiful, regardless of what their fat content is or if their thighs touch. Girls would spend less time worrying about the way their bodies compare to celebrities and more time doing things that they love. Being proud of your body should come from the inside out, not the other way around.
