Let me start off by saying, I am a healthy nineteen-year-old girl. I have no "weight-related" health conditions like diabetes or high cholesterol, and I exercise daily-almost daily.
Most days I drag my ass to the gym, spend an hour on the treadmill, four and a half miles per hour, level eight incline, or I spend forty-five minutes lifting weights in an attempt to fill out a bit.
This is normal for many girls my age and women who are older than I.
We spend hours in the gym, working on our bodies for our health and for our confidence, posting gym selfies before the workout to feel that gratification. After years of doing this I begin to wonder, Will I ever be completely happy, satisfied, with the way I look? The truth is I don't think I ever will, and that's ok.
After many years of struggling with my body image, I took matters into my own hands and I started working out nightly around age fifteen. I lost weight, thirty pounds to be exact and I felt good about myself, but not as good as I thought I would. I still saw the things that I didn't like. I continued to workout because it made me happy to exercise, but I couldn't stop focusing on my biggest "flaw", my stomach.
Even now, at the most confident I've ever been, I still look at myself and I see my stomach as my biggest flaw.
I always think that if my stomach would just get flatter, I would finally be satisfied with my body, but I doubt that is true. Once my stomach flattens, it will only give way to me seeing the other things I see as flaws, and one of them will become my biggest flaw. Even Instagram models, who young girls worship, have admitted to feeling this phenomenon. This is human nature. When we reach one goal, we tend to try to tackle another. This is why I may never be satisfied with my body, but there are many reasons why it's ok to not never be completely satisfied.
Body Positive Insta-posts and blogs sometimes seem to give off the idea that you have to constantly be in love with your body, but that's just not possible.
It can get exhausting to look at yourself in the mirror when you see things you don't like, and I personally will not force myself scream at my mirror to love myself when I just don't love the way I look. Instead I've learned to focus on how I feel. When I go to workout, I feel strong, powerful, tough. When I sit at my desk and read for school I feel smart and accomplished, and while I am watching children's movies on Netflix, stuffing myself with peach rings I feel happy. When I am hugging my significant other in the middle of my favorite city I feel amazing, and that to me feels better than worrying about the way my body looks in that moment.
I conclude this by saying I am a healthy nineteen-year-old girl, who exercises daily and eats moderately well. I may never be completely satisfied with the way my body looks, but that's OK, because there are so many more satisfying feelings to me.
