Let's Talk about Body Image

        Hi friends, I have been looking at other fashion blogs and vlogs for inspiration lately.  I've noticed that most of these blogs spread a consistently inconsistent message about body image.  This is not just done by blogs, but by magazines, TV shows, and just about anyone who doles out fashion advice.  They will claim they endorse body positivity, because body positivity is cool right now, and then give out body shaming advice.  They say embrace yourself—then tell you how to hide your flaws.  They say love your body—right before discussing how to look more skinny in photos or how to look like you have bigger boobs or a better butt.  "Embrace yourself" seems to really mean "embrace the things that fit a narrow beauty standard, and hide or change the rest."   The original reason I started blogging was to provide a body positive perspective on fashion that was, you know, actually body positive.

No Beyonce, you didn't wake up like that.  Normal people don't wake
up professionally made up.  We should be deeply concerned about
 the person who does.  

        Body positive fashion is important to me because I struggled with my body for a long time. Most people probably find that social media and the fashion industry hurt their self-image.  These sources saturate our world with imaginary ideas about what people should and do look like.  This makes it difficult to embrace the beauty of a real unphotoshopped human.  In contrast, I found that pursuing fashion as an interest helped me develop a much healthier relationship with my body.  So let's talk about clothing, body image, and how, in theory, to make them play nice with each other.

 

Instagram has left us unable to appreciate Squidward's natural beauty.

        I am generally very open about the eating disorder I had in high school.  If you are close to me, I have probably told you this already.  If I never got around to mentioning this to you, Surprise! Admittedly, an eating disorder is kind of a shitty surprise.  Sorry about that.  I promise I'll provide a better surprise later. I have tried to be very open about the eating disorder to, in some small way, help reduce the shame and stigma around struggling with one.

        Toward the end of ninth grade, my health class assigned us to record everything we ate for a week and the nutrition facts.  For some reason I really wanted to seem 'healthy'.  So I adjusted my eating habits that week to try to model what I thought our health teacher would want to see.  From there, I very slowly but surely became fixated on what I ate and how much I exercised.  I thought I was just trying to be healthy at first.  But then I signed up for a school award that required a certain number of hours of personal fitness as an excuse to exercise obsessively.  Eventually, I would get very anxious if I could not get my full exercise routine in.  I remember watching a movie with my boyfriend after eating a concerningly large meal, and trying to sneak in ab exercises without him noticing.  He noticed.  I remember sitting in the car going to a holiday dinner and trying to sneak in exercises to offset the upcoming large meal without my family noticing.  They noticed.  I remember that I only give myself an apple and 125 calories of peanut butter for lunch.  Yes, I know exactly how many calories of peanut butter I allowed myself.   I never actually lost weight doing this.  I would have said that I lacked the self-control for a real eating disorder.  Still, the obsession with food, exercise, and not being able to pinch any fat on my stomach completely occupied my mind.

SURPRISE!  Cute baby pandas have come to lighten up the
rather heavy discussion of my screwed up body image.
Thank you baby pandas!

        My warped view of myself not only hurt me, but also those I cared about.  I was skinny, and if I was so insistent that I looked bad, what did that convey to my friends who were less skinny than I?  If I was so visibly appalled by body fat on myself, how could I possibly tolerate it in my boyfriend?  My negative view of myself spread like an illness, infecting those closest to me.

 

Baby elephant to the rescue!

        I cannot quite say what got me over it.  If I had to guess I would point to a few incidents that scared me out of continuing my obsessive behavior.  The first incident was during the winter of my senior year of high school.  I tried to make myself throw up, failed to do so, and then panicked.  When your reflection stares back at you from the bottom of a toilet bowl you suddenly become one of those girls.   You become one of the girls you thought only existed in after school TV specials because no real person would actually be that desperate to be thin.  I thought no real, rational, sane person, which I certainly felt I was, could be that desperate.  But now I was one of those girls.  I could no longer pretend I didn't have a problem.  I could no longer pretend that careful calorie control, followed by gorging on junk food because I was hungry from not eating, followed by neurotic exercising was just normal weight management.  This was the first time I actively tried to push back against my obsessive behavior.

 

This polar bear cubs can't read.  They don't know that we are talking about
an uncomfortable topic.  They just want to cuddle.

        In the spring of that year my health teacher described the symptoms of eating disorders to our class.  Even though I had scared myself out of traditional purging, my obsessive working out and eating habits still made me qualify as bulimic.  Bulimic is a loaded word.  It was scary to suddenly have that label. This was the second wake up call.  It got me to again push back against my obsessive behavior.  

       While it scared me to be labeled bulimic, the freshman fifteen scared me more than an eating disorder did.   Part of me still intended to "have more control over what I ate" when I got to college.  By more control I mean more disordered behavior.  I was a smart girl, I figured I could handle "control" without letting the food obsession get out of hand.  Because you know, thinking constantly about what I had or would eat didn't count as things getting out of hand already.

 

Baby hedgehog is happy to tell you that the heavy part is almost over

        Fortunately for me, the opposite happened when I got to college.  I just stopped caring.  This I attribute to the some of the girls on my freshman hall.  The girls on my hall freshman year were a bit obsessed with avoiding the freshman fifteen, perhaps even more so than I was.  It was their fixation on avoiding the freshman fifteen that gave me perspective.  Seeing how preoccupied they were with working out and with what they ate and with looking a certain way in fling tanks made me realize how ludicrous my behavior had been.  I didn't want to behave like the girls on my hall.  I didn’t want their lives, and I mostly stopped obsessing over being thin.

 

The girls on my hall made me realize how unhealthy I had been.
I do not intend to shame them, or Meghan Fox here for being
concerned with their appearance.  There is immense pressure
on women to look good.  It's hypocritical to shame women for trying
 to look good, when we also tell them that it is essential that they look pretty.

      In time I learned much healthier ways to take care of and think about my body. These helped me avoid relapsing.  I started taking group classes at the gym with the intention of becoming strong and athletic, not so much of becoming thin.  The classes did a few things for me.  They provided a very positive and encouraging environment for working out.  This released the stress that usually contributed to my body issues, without encouraging a fixation on getting thin.  The instructors had a variety of builds, from tiny and lean, to large and muscular, to distinctly chunky.  They showed me there were many ways other than just being thin to be powerful and healthy.

        I also learned how to dress myself in a way that complimented the things I liked about my body.  This brings me back to my discussion of fashion and body image.  I don't blame the fashion industry for my eating disorder.  I think I always considered models to be unrealistic and never particularly cared to look like them.  I'ld say my eating disorder rose out of my personality.  I was a perfectionist, very competitive, very controlling, and not getting into the colleges I wanted to.  I was basically a perfect storm for an eating disorder.  But many people, likely including the girls on my hall, feel compelled to go to unhealthy ends to meet the impossible standards portrayed by entertainment, fashion, and social media.

        I found a way to love my body through fashion.  In trying to dress nicely, I learned to focus on things I liked about myself as opposed to things I didn't.  I like to think of clothing as self-expression.  Part of self-expression is deciding for yourself what counts as pretty or cool or interesting.  When I started decided for myself what looks good, I became much more indifferent to external beauty standards.

 

My beauty standard = Looking like a dinosaur

        One does not just learn to think positively about themselves overnight.  I still struggle with my body image at times, particularly when people around me complain about their bodies, or when I get mistaken for a fourteen-year-old, or when I get overwhelmed at school.  I still have many of the habits I picked up during my eating disorder.  Some are harmless, like a taste for spicy food (spicy food is supposedly an appetite suppressant).  Some are less harmless, like a tendency to pinch my stomach.  So I still need to be kind to myself to keep unhealthy thoughts from creeping back up on me.  I have found setting fitness goals, such as being able to lift a certain amount of weight or stretch in a certain way, instead of setting weight or clothing size goals has helped me focus on what my body can do as opposed to how it looks.

 

Obviously I need to grow a beard so people stop saying I look 14

         I have found that dressing to focus on my favorite features, keeps me from fixating on what I don't like.  The ideal body is a completely made up thing.  Thin bodies or thick bodies or squiggly bodies are just a passing trend.  In a few years a new body type will come into style, and then everyone will have to scramble to make their bodies fit, or look like they fit the new ideal.  It is a pointless marathon—one you cannot win.  The clothing industry is perfectly happy to keep changing the ideal so that you keep needing to buy new clothing to fit it.  You will feel much better about yourself if the fashion industry can't tell you that the body you worked so hard to get to fit an old ideal is no longer considered beautiful.  If you create your own ideal no one can take that away from you.  Focus on what you like about yourself.  You don’t even need to focus on physical traits, mental and emotional ones deserve love too.  If you are in the habit of only seeing the worst in yourself, it will take time to unlearn this behavior.  Every time you fixate on a trait you don't like, remind yourself of one you do.  In time you can train yourself to see the good in you first.  Dressing to play up your best traits, or to fit your own ideal will help with this immensely.

 

We all know dinosaurs were the original hotties

         While fashion has created a minefield of insecurity and screwed up body images, it can also create a space for self-expression and self-love.  Next week I will discuss how to dress yourself in a way that encourages the self-love and self-expression most fashion experts only pretend to believe in.  If you are feeling bad about how you look, I can guarantee that you are not alone.   Don't feel ashamed of your insecurities, we all wrestle with them.  When I opened up about my insecurities and eating issues, I found many other people, both male and female, who struggled with the same issues.  Some people who opened up to me had much more severe disorders than I, some had much milder symptoms.  But, all of our experiences were valid.  Now we can help each other avoid falling into old habits.  We all got past our disorders.  We are all far more than our disorders. If you feel like you need someone to talk to, I am happy to listen, that's part of the reason I wrote this. I promise you, it gets better.