While everyone likes to believe that the saying "new year, new me" is true, we all know it really isn't. It's been four days in 2016 and some of you may have already given up on your resolution to go to the gym every day or eat healthier. That's why I'm going to tell you to focus on something far more important than changing your outside appearance: changing the way you feel about yourself on the inside.
Let me preface this by saying that if you're someone who actually can stick to your goals of changing your body and you're doing it for healthy reasons, in a healthy way, you should do it. I am speaking from personal experience here.
Every year before this one I had set a goal along the lines of, "2015 will be the year I have the perfect body" or " In 2014 I will lose x amount of weight." It took me a while to come to the realization that I had these resolutions for the wrong reasons. If I was doing this to improve my health or make myself happier with exercise, that would have been great. But I wasn't. I was doing it to try to fit the societal constructs of what I believed beauty was.
Growing up with the media telling me that if I didn't look like a Victoria's Secret model, something was wrong with me, I always felt that I needed to change myself to be more like them. That is not self-love or acceptance. Moreover, trying to be something you're not is not self-love or acceptance. It's something I'm still working on, but I can proudly say that I don't have a new year's resolution this year, just the overall goal of learning to love myself, regardless of what I look like.
And I believe this should be something everyone aspires to. A quote I keep coming back to is, "It is a revolutionary act to love yourself in the face of a world who openly tells you to hate yourself." Humans, not just women, are told that we have to look a certain way in order to be considered beautiful, but who made these rules and standards? And when did we agree to adhere to them as a society? When did self confidence become a negative thing? When and why did loving yourself become cocky?
So, how do we even start to move away from this culture of self hate? Stop reading tabloids and beauty magazines. Stop watching E! News. Stop comparing yourself to photoshopped people in ads. Start accepting compliments instead of deflecting them. Tell yourself you're beautiful the way you are now, not that you will be after you lose weight. Dress the way you want, not the way magazines tell you to. Unapologetically and wholly love yourself. All of this is just a start because it is extremely difficult to escape this mindset. It's something that's been ingrained in us from a very young age, but a start to revolutionary thinking is better than nothing.
