I don’t care about your stupid diet. I don’t care if you’ve been so “good” today and would ruin it with a “bad” piece of chocolate. I don’t care that you can only have half the cookie because OMG a full one is, like, 200 calories. I don’t care that you ran on the treadmill for an hour to “work off” that bowl of pasta. I don’t care that you feel “fat” today. But I do care about your selfesteem and your well-being. I care about your happiness. I care about you. This sounds terribly earnest, but it’s true. I don’t want us - especially us women - to keep suffering like this. Besides, there are way more interesting things to talk about. (Literally everything else is more interesting than diets.) So we need to stop “fat talk.” This means no more shaming our bodies or the bodies of our friends. This means no more seemingly positive compliments, like, “You look great - did you lose weight?” Obviously we need to find new ways to communicate. I know we’ve all heard “Love your body!” too many times to count -- so many times that we’ve become desensitized to the message. And what we all know is that the phrase doesn’t really mean anything. It may be uplifting for a moment or a day, but soon we realize we still don’t know how to love our bodies.
Of course, it’s not our fault. The sexism that has permeated our society for centuries has told us over and over exactly how we should look, usually with very conflicting messages. We need to be skinny, but not too skinny -- real women have curves, after all. We need to have big boobs and perky butts but never, ever look slutty. And we need to do this all effortlessly.
I say screw it. There’s no way to win. I mean this literally. Even if we manage to get our bodies to the supposed ideal – through unnecessary surgery, painful dieting and self-loathing – we have to sacrifice so much. And for what? No matter how close we get to perfection, we’ll never be close enough. Perfection doesn’t exist.
We need to paste positive messages on our mirrors. Reminders not that we’re beautiful, but that we’re smart, funny, strong, clever and patient. The point is to take away the focus on appearance. We would never tell our friends that they’d be better people with smaller thighs, so we shouldn’t say the same thing to ourselves.
Embrace your curves or your straight-figure. Every time you start to beat yourself up, really think about whether or not it’s worth it. Do you really want to work out for an hour, or would that time be better spent reading, hanging out with friends or studying? Because unless you get to eating disorder territory (and watch out for the second part of this opinion, coming out in March in honor of National Eating Disorder Awareness Month), your body won’t change much. That’s just the reality. Just think about the time you’d save not punishing your body. Think about the mental energy you could harvest, the positivity and creativity you could generate. Spend time doing things that make you happy and engage you. Remember what it was like to be a kid, not worrying about how you looked when you were running, climbing and dancing? Be that kid again. Have fun. Eat nutrient-rich food most of the time, enjoy your favorite treats when you want, and move your body in ways that make it feel good. Focus on anything except your stupid diet. Ain’t nobody got time for that.
BY APRILL EMIG Senior Staff Reporter