Recently, being on social media, especially Instagram and twitter I've been seeing a lot of woman with "perfect bodies" being looked at as "queens" or "goddess'." Apparently only if you have wide hips, a big ass, a flat stomach and a big set of boobs you are "body goals." If you look unreal, you are praised. Growing up as a female, I know that real human female bodies come with stretch marks, cellulite and hair. It's all normal. t's a part of common human nature. It took me years to realize that I'm not the only girl in the world with these "flaws."
Growing up, dealing with body image was a huge part of who I became. I used to weigh over 200 pounds. When I was younger, I never saw anything wrong with my body. I just knew I was bigger than everyone else but I never saw a problem in it. I didn't see a problem in loving food and not being guilty about eating the foods that I loved. That's because there shouldn't be any guilt in it. It was only until I went into middle school that I started to see that being a bigger girl was apparently a "bad" thing. Kids used to scream in my face to call me fat, once I was actually called an "ugly piece of shit" (yes, seriously.) And from then on I started to discover how to hate myself in a society built on it's own structured sense of beauty.
My first year in high school I started to loose weight. I downloaded a dieting app on my new iPhone that I had gotten for christmas that year. I counted my calories religiously, worked out almost everyday, and transformed my life into a scheduled one. One where I had to sit there and think for more than a few minutes, sometimes more than twenty about the next thing that was going to go into my mouth. Pretty soon I became a dieting zombie. When I would go out to eat with friends or family I would stress over the things on the menu, constantly observing the calories, fat and carbs in each piece of food before it went into my system. I actually thought about how the food was being digested into my body, where the carbs were going, where the fat was going. It drove me absolutely insane! I was actually starting to starve. Walking in the hallway to classes I would almost pass out. I could barley keep myself awake in the mornings, and my mood was mostly angry all of the time. By then it didn't turn into dieting or changing my lifestyle. It turned into just loosing my weight so I could "like myself more." Pretty soon I lost eighty pounds, but because I basically starved myself, right after I immediately started to gain it back.
Even after I had lost all of that weight, I still hated myself. still had strech marks and extra skin and cellulite. I hated myself because I didn't look how I wanted to look yet. I hated myself because I didn't look like all of the perfect woman I would see being praised in the media or on T.V or in Ads. I wasn't right looking yet. I was still just me. and from then I knew the problem wasn't that I didn't like myself because of the extra weight I carried, I didn't like myself because I just didn't have good self esteem. And most of that bad self esteem came from comparing myself to other woman. I thought that loosing all of that weight would make me finally love who I am, and love what I look like. But in fact, to be honest, it made me feel worse. Not just the whole process of loosing weight itself, but even after, when I was forced to face the truth. Liking or loving yourself doesn't come from changing the way you are on the outside, it comes from changing the way you are on the inside too.
The idea of having a perfect body will never exist. Being perfect doesn't exist. and when people learn that they will finally learn to stop blaming themselves and start blaming the structured society we all come from that tells us our bodies have to look a certain way. Because they don't. And the way your body looks doesn't define the kind of person you are or weather you are granted as being beautiful. Because all women are beautiful. And when you're looking at a pretty girl and saying "Why don't I look like her?" there's another girl scrolling through your instagram asking the same thing. the idea of beauty doesn't come from what other people think you should look like, it comes from accepting and loving who you are.
