I am so much bigger than my body

What if our body wasn’t at the forefront of what was important in our lives?

What if our body simply came along with us in our beautiful lives?

The more we separate our Selves from our bodies, the closer we get to being able to live our truest and most meaningful, one and only beautiful life.

My eating disorder trapped me in my body for years. Held me captive, and convinced me that I was my body. It has taken years of work and un-learning to gain a new agreement. That I am not my body at all, in fact I am so much bigger than my body. My body is lucky she can hold all of this in!

By bringing our bodies into the forefront of body positivity conversations.. we bring the conversation back to the body. When the conversation is truly meant to be.. every human, every body deserves equal respect, rights, and access (to food and all things) regardless of race, gender, sexual orientation or identity, etc etc. If you listen closely to that statement it has much less to do with the body (for most of us) because a lot of my readers and listeners, my self included contain at least a bit of body privilege (the experience of living in a body deemed acceptable by society) and while this is not always a comfortable thing to realize, it is an extremely important thing to recognize if we want to do real work out in the world.

If we continue to bring our socially acceptable bodies into the forefront of our work, our conversations around “body positivity” we will continue to enforce the belief that women that are able to walk into any store at any time and find clothes that fit them with ease, are the bodies that we should continue to strive for. This validates the thin ideal.

Yes, ALL bodies should be celebrated and accepted! Yes even my socially acceptable one! But how can I do that in a way that does not take away the space in which bodies that are almost never celebrated, can be celebrated. To be honest my body shape is actually celebrated kind of everywhere. Why do I need to add to that?

Little girls everywhere are growing up with one image of what a body should look like,  just like we did. Little girls whose bodies will grow into women’s bodies that all look so uniquely different. Look what happened to us. Look how easily we blame diet culture. What is one half of the word “diet culture”? “culture.” And who is at least partly responsible for culture? The people in the culture!!!!!!

Today I invite myself to sit down and shut up before I post my body, proclaiming my love for it as body positive with a hashtag as part of a movement. May I sit and hold space for the others to move into the movement. May I uplift other bodies of different shapes, sizes, races than my own. May I celebrate their beautiful bodies today.

I do love my body, and hell yes she deserves to be celebrated. Maybe we can do that in our own special way, her and I. And then I can tell myself the most important lesson in all this work I have learned thus far.. I am so much bigger than my body.