Body positivity

I have rare and chronic diseases, so I guess the fact that my body doesn't work well is more important to me than how it looks, even when I'm disgusted with it. I can't say I've ever DISLIKED it, exactly. It's just like a rather burdensome pet most of the time.

Focus on what you can do today that you couldn't yesterday...or on regaining strength/ability/endurance.

cosimavonmoreau wrote: »

Hello does Anyone have any tips on how to stay body positive. I have always had body image issues and although I have sorted out my weight (even through I could defiantly lose more) I just get these periods of liturally hating myself and feeling disgusted with myself. Does anyone feel the same?

Im the same way. Even though I lost more weight than my goal and am pretty slim, i always find stuff to criticize about my body. I have dismorphia

I have this occasionally, too. I've found that being highly active (hitting the gym every work day, and 4 sessions of outside physical hobbies - drumming and martial arts) has helped me regulate my moods and confidence very well.

There's a quote from Plato (I think) that I really like for body positivity:

It is a shame for a man to grow old without seeing the beauty and strength of which his body is capable.

It's a difficult thing to wrap your head around - that your body is a beautiful, strong thing capable of more than you could imagine - but once you think about it, I think it can become truly powerful.

Even if you started sickly thin or morbidly obese, your body has stuck with you. It may have suffered - and you may well have put it there yourself - but it has held on. Now, you're making conscious decisions to try to better yourself and your body, and it's working. Slowly, and you may step backwards at times, but it is working.

If you could only do one push up from your knees three months ago, maybe now you can do a full push up from your toes. If you could barely walk a block without running out of breath, now you can run the block no sweat.

It has and will continue to be a long journey, but every day you continue to grow. Even if you're moving backwards in your goals, each day is more experience for you to draw on. Failures count as much (and often times more) than success. Allow yourself to forgive and accept these. You don't have to adore your failures, but neither must you put them on a pedestal or bare them on your back.

For me, I gave myself Runner's Knee and Jumper's Knee in my right side simultaneously during a track session that was all about self-loathing instead of healthy pushing my limits. It threw me for a real loop, but now I know that when my body tells me that I'm in pain and something's going to go, that I need to protect it. I think we're always going to have brief (and hopefully briefer still) periods of time when we hate ourselves and how we think we're horrible failures, but if you keep track of your progress and you track your lifting/martial art/dancing/whatever activity you choose's progress, you can abate that a bit.

Plato's quote for me means that pushing myself isn't about hating my body and punishing it. It's about finding my limits, testing them carefully and giving myself and my body the time and training necessary to slowly push my capacity. I want to see how far I can go - I want to see what my body is capable of. I deserve it, so does my body. It's an act of love and development, not of hate.

You might also like The Iron Samurai. He's a weightlifter and mathematician who views lifting and being active as a way to manage a healthy self-view and has a lot of awesome articles on human behaviour, depression and weightlifting as a way to manage that.