Summer is bikini season, especially when you live in the city with the country’s best beach. Parading around on the sand in bikinis that seem to get smaller every year sounds fun and carefree in theory but for many girls, summer becomes synonymous with a constant preoccupation with looking thin.
More and more, we criticize our bodies and constantly compare them to others, making excuses for why we don’t look a certain way. Regardless of our size, us women have grown to fear what people think when they see us in a bathing suit. “I had lunch right before, my food baby is huge” has become a subtle way of voicing our insecurities about our stomachs, making up an excuse for why it isn’t as flat as a Victoria’s Secret model’s. We put on our bikinis, but not without using phrases like this as verbal armor to protect from the judgments of others.
Being aware of your physical state is important and there is nothing wrong with keeping tabs on your appearance but lately it has become the focus of many unhealthy obsessions. We continuously put ourselves down for not looking like the pictures we see on Instagram of models, celebrities, or even other girls when the truth is, those girls don’t always look like that either. Pictures capture a specific moment in time of a specific angle with specific lighting. Muscles are flexed, bodies are twisted, stomachs are sucked in, and after all this physical tweaking even the resulting photograph is then edited. Put the girl next to the photograph and I guarantee you they won’t look the same. The problem really starts when we see altered, perfected, images of others and then compare those to what we see in the mirror every day. How is that fair to our bodies? With so much pressure to appear perfect, we forget that humans are innately imperfect. So much of what we see is just an illusion and when we hold our real-life selves to those unrealistic standards, we are feeding into the negative body image issue.
When it really comes down to it, you are your biggest critic. Constantly berating your “problem areas” serves no purpose because more often than not, no one notices them but you. Our psyches don’t enjoy being bullied and put down, so why do we think it is okay to bully our bodies? Positive thoughts lead to positive body image and the less we focus on our imperfections and instead praise our attributes, the better we will feel about ourselves.
If you live a healthy lifestyle, give yourself a pat on the back and smile the next time you look in the mirror. If you aren’t happy with what you see then make a change but do not verbally abuse yourself. Self-confidence and positive body image stem from the little voice inside your head so the next time you catch a glimpse of your body in the mirror, do yourself a favor and think happy thoughts. Self-confidence makes a bikini look twice as good.
