On the week of Feb. 22-26, the UA Student Health Center launched Body Appreciation Week in partnership with National Eating Disorders Awareness Week. This annual celebration of healthy body image on the University of Alabama’s campus consisted of events dedicated to promoting self love and acceptance.
Even though Body Appreciation Week is technically over, you can still spend every week of the year learning to love yourself and appreciating your body. Here are five ways to get you started!
1. Address bad habits
Have you struggled with an eating disorder in the past? Are you still struggling? Get help. Contact the counseling center, contact the campus dietitian, contact someone if you feel you need support.
Even if you have not experienced something as serious as an eating disorder, you may have engaged in actions that hurt your body image. Bad habits such as skipping meals or binging contribute to negative thoughts about your body and prevent you from loving yourself. If you treat your body unkindly, it is hard to begin to appreciate it. Challenge how you mistreat yourself and begin to make practical advances towards doing good things for your body.
2. Skip the trash talk
You know the negative speech this refers to. When you are eating with your friends and you say, “I’m going to have to go the gym to burn off all of these calories,” you are contributing to the trash talk. When you order a large meal and say, “I’ve been so good today— I deserve this,” you are contributing.
Well, you deserve to love your body no matter what you eat. While it takes a great deal of time and energy to garner a positive body image, avoiding language like this is a step in the right direction.
3. Encourage others
When you hear your friends speaking in unhealthy tones like above, do not ignore it or let their comments slide. Say something to encourage them beyond the usual, “I don’t even know what you’re talking about, you are SO skinny.”
Girls sometimes run the risk of bringing each other down. When one girl says something nasty about her body, it is widely acceptable for everyone else to point out something imperfect about theirs. This needs to stop.
If you are working on improving your body image, be the friend who brightens everyone’s day by saying positive things. This should encourage others around you to follow suit.
4. Make a plan
Sometimes, you just have a bad day that carries over to your thoughts about yourself and food. Maybe you were busy and had to skip lunch, so you ate a large dinner and now feel out of control. Maybe you saw a picture of a model and it made you wish you could resemble her. Whatever happens, there will be slip ups during your journey of body positivity. The key is to have a plan for when they occur.
You do not have to go to the gym or skip dinner if you eat a big meal at lunch. If you feel overwhelmed, do a simple task that makes yourself feel good and takes your mind off of negative thoughts. Call a friend. Call your mom. Take a bath. Watch your favorite movie. Tailor your plan to fit your personal needs, and make sure it involves being kind to yourself.
5. Look in the mirror more
You are probably thinking you look in the mirror too much, but looking at yourself is not the cause of negative body image. Your thoughts when looking in the mirror are responsible. Instead of looking at yourself and thinking about your flaws, look at yourself and focus on what makes your body special. You may not look like a model, but you do look like yourself. Your body is always there for you, and being able to look at yourself and feel proud comes when you accept your differences and love them.
Everyone deals with negative body image. Everyone has days where they feel fat. In college especially, everyone also has more important things to do than obsess about the food they eat and how they look in leggings. Loving yourself takes effort, but being able to truly love yourself is worth all the effort in the world.