The obsession and fixation of being as thin as possible has been perpetuated for decades. It’s instilled in women since our conception into this world. As a mother may scold you for getting seconds at dinner time and the boy in your middle school class tells you your stomach rolls as you sit and the teen magazines give you “five tips on how to lose weight fast this summer,” you know that smaller will always be preferred. As women, we are always told that skinny is best. Naturally, I took the critiques of society telling me I must be small to be valuable. To be thin in society is synonymous with being beautiful and more than that, being worthy.
Through deep reflection and years of self shaming over how my body fit into certain clothes or speculating on if certain angles made my stomach look flatter, I realized that listening to the world wanting me to take up less space was so contradictory to everything I believed. I ditched the constant ridicule that I imposed upon myself every time the scale gained a few numbers and quit obsessing over the calories of my lunch. I knew that truly, my worth was not determined by a few arbitrary numbers that flashed on the bathroom scale. As a person, I am so much more interesting and multifaceted than being known for my body. Instead of walking past a mirror and lifting up my shirt to see if my stomach had changed since I had last walked by, I realized that the only person who had the power to determine my worth was myself. With that information I set myself free.
I began journaling in order to unpack where all of this self ridicule began. I realized that from birth society told me through advertising and marketing campaigns that a woman is never enough as is. I began pushing back on these ideas that had been drilled into my head for so long. I began healing through rewiring my negative thought patterns surrounding my own body and its ties to my self-worth in general, I also began truly dissecting the media I was being fed and discerning what types of messages I should weed out of my consumption to the best of my ability. This came with lots of Instagram unfollowings and beginning to file through my TikTok for you page hitting “not interested” on messages that were unproductive in my journey to self acceptance and peace with my body.
I knew then that I would never value another person based on their size or what they had consumed that day, so why would I have such standards for my own self worth? My true strengths are those held in my soul and character and their importance is far grander than the calories I consumed. When I valued myself for more than just the way my body looked, I realized that I freed up so much mental space to enhance and really nurture the beautiful parts inside of myself. And finally I was free to take up as much space as I would like, and am proud that there is more of me to love.