Every time my five-year-old daughter stands in front of the mirror to brush her teeth or hair, she has to strike a pose, jut out a hip, try a new hairstyle.
A part of me worries “oh no, she’s trying to look sexy” or “that hairstyle came from a Barbie” but a bigger part of me thinks “you go girl!”
Because every time she looks in the mirror it’s with a smile on her face. My sons, at seven and three, are the same. They’re genuinely happy to see themselves in the mirror.
When was the last time you felt that way? Most adults can’t look in the mirror without finding fault — if not with a nose that’s too big, or a hairstyle that needs updating, than with the shape and size of our bodies.
It’s not that we hate our bodies, although many of us do. It’s mostly that we don’t embrace them or celebrate them as being our own. That’s the theme of Eating Disorder Awareness Week this year: Celebrating our natural sizes.
The fact is we do have a natural size. Not everyone is built to be a size two. I recently lost weight and went from a size 18-20 to a size 12-14. And while I acknowledge I still have some more weight to lose before I feel I’m done, I also know that I probably won’t make it down to size eight, let alone the six I used to want to be.
It’s just not the way I’m built. My end goal isn’t to fit into a certain dress or wear a certain style, but to be healthier and more active.
Unfortunately, it took me many years of weight battles to get to that understanding. The more I sought out the “ideal” size, the more disordered my eating became. I fluctuated from extreme dieting to overeating in despair. While I’ve never had an eating disorder, like many women — and men — I have done stupid things in the guise of weight loss.
I don’t want my daughter and sons to have that relationship with food. And I don’t want them to ever think that their ideal is unattainable. And I don’t want them to ever feel that society and not genetics and environment is what should dictate their sizes. Right now, my daughter is tiny. She’s so small, in fact, that people have trouble believing she actually eats.
That’s not fair either. As she grows older, if she stays the same shape she is now, I know that at some point someone will jealously accuse her of being anorexic. Because so many of us aren’t a size two, we think anyone that is must be “cheating” somehow.
The fact is that throughout their lives, my children are going to be judged, one way or another, on how they look and what the shape of their bodies are. And as I look at them preening and posing and smiling at themselves in the mirror, that thought is incredibly disturbing.
I wish I could somehow record this for them and use it to show them how much they love themselves and their bodies. So that one day, when the inevitable “I don’t measure up” look sweeps over their faces as they look in the mirror, I can remind them that their bodies are to be loved and celebrated, not disenfranchised and demeaned.
Not everyone who hates their body winds up with an eating disorder. If that happened there’d be a lot more eating disorders, I imagine. But such hatred does fuel the $33 billion a year diet industry — an industry that often promises quick fixes, easy plans, and total body transformations — all by alienating you from your food choices and neglecting to incorporate healthy activity as part of that “transformation.”
Is it any wonder 95 per cent of diets fail? They’re not realistic or maintainable.
And neither are most of our expectations. On average, fashion models are 23 per cent thinner than the general population of women.
The majority of them are genetically predetermined to be thin, just as many “average” women are genetically predetermined to be a size 10. It doesn’t matter how many diet solutions you try, most women are just not capable of being fashion-model thin.
This lack of awareness of our own bodies combined with a buying in of the media and industry challenges to match an ideal is a large part of what fuels poor body image and can contribute to eating disorders. Many of us spend time every day thinking about our size and our diets and how we don’t measure up.
This week, try to take time each day to reflect on where those thoughts are coming from instead. For parents, this is especially important, because our children are growing up under even more pressure than we did. Unless we deconstruct and demystify these concepts for them, they’ll learn to hate, not celebrate, their natural size ... whatever that may be.
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