Stop Hiding: Four Things That Helped Me Love My Body
By: Elena Kirillova
Tags: Beyourself, Beauty, Body Positive, Body Image, Self Love

Art by Nidhi Chanani

I’ve known for a while that it’s not the way you look that makes you lovable, sexy, fun, or interesting. I’ve seen it over and over again in people around me. I knew it rationally, in my mind, and yet I didn’t believe it.

1. Megan Jayne Crabbe

Things started to change when I stumbled upon Megan Jayne Crabbe, @bodiposipanda, on Instagram. There she was in her underwear and with a flower in her hair — with her belly rolls and no thigh gap — smiling peacefully at me through the screen.

Image by Megan Jayne Crabbe (@bodyposipanda)

Wow, I thought, all the things I hate about my body look beautiful on this woman simply because she looks happy.

In another post, Megan addressed herself: “Here we are babygirl, soft like marshmallows and velvet and the kind of body peace you deserved all along.”

I, too, have a soft belly! I thought, she is right, why shouldn’t I love its softness? It made sense in my mind, but I still didn’t believe it. So I began to practice in front of my mirror. I would touch my belly, pat its soft parts, and say to myself, “this is like velvet and cute like marshmallow,” and then I would look at the bumps and dimples on my body and say, “this is as beautiful as stars in the Milky Way.” I didn’t believe what I was saying but kept at it.

And at some point it just clicked. Practicing looking at myself, touching myself, comparing my softness and cellulite to beautiful things, and seeing Megan enjoying her body in my Instagram feed worked. I didn’t even notice when the change occurred, but one day I stood in front of my mirror, touched my soft bits and suddenly realized that I now believed what I was saying — my belly was, indeed, as nice and soft as velvet. I laughed. It now became funny to me that I ever thought of my belly rolls other than wonderful.

2. Come as You Are: The Surprising New Science That Will Transform Your Sex Life

Come as You Are is a book written by a sex educator and researcher Emily Nagoski that dispels many a myth about sex and female bodies.

It taught me to accept a part of my body that I rarely thought about — my vulva. In the chapter “Anatomy: Not Two Alike,” Nagoski points out the faultiness of cultural attitudes towards female genitals. This part especially resonated with me because I thought that the inner lips of my vulva were too saggy and dark. Why would I think that? This is why, Nagoski says:

“As with the clitoris, the cultural view of labia doesn’t match the biological reality. Vulvas in soft-core porn are digitally edited to conform to a specific standard of “tucked-in” labia and homogeneous coloring, to be “less detailed.” This means that cultural representations of vulvas are limited to a pretty narrow range. In reality, there is a great deal of variety among genitals — and there is no medical condition associated with almost any of the variability. . . . Only rarely do you find the tidily tucked-in vulvas you see in Playboy.”

Does this sound familiar? Your culture creating a need in you to strive for some sort of unrealistic perfection — making you feel ashamed of the body you have? Nagoski suggests an exercise with the mirror in which you meet your vulva, find your clitoris, and tell yourself that your genitals are natural and normal. Here’s what she told a former student that worried about the size of her clitoris that was “like a baby carrot, almost”:

Everyone’s genitals are made of all the same parts, just organized in different ways. The differences don’t necessarily mean anything, they’re just varieties of beautiful and healthy.

This time around I didn’t need weeks to accept what Nagoski was saying. I already learned from Megan Crabbe that no one gets to police my body. I honestly haven’t even thought about my vulva’s appearance for a while and was surprised to find in my mind negative perceptions of it. As I read Come As You Are, I was happy to sweep these remainders of body shaming right out of my head.

3. Nutritionist

For a good part of my life I bought into the criminality of eating sweets, fat, and carbs. When I went to see a nutritionist this fall, it’s already been a few years since I came out to my family and friends as a binge eater, no longer dieted, and no longer denied any kind of food to my body. However, I was still hiding some of my eating habits from the people around me.

Here’s a short conversation with my nutritionist that helped me changed that:

“I was getting dinner at a food court with my classmates and really wanted a cookie. But I thought, oh, what would everyone think if I got a cookie for dinner,” I told him.

“Oh no, how criminal, a cookie,” he laughed. I laughed in reply.

“The truth is,” he continued, “no one would have cared if you had a cookie. And even if they did think that it was weird. Have you seen the people on campus? We’re all weird. Just have a cookie.”

His advice was: stop hiding, do you, be weird, we all are. And that’s what I did. And you know what happened? Once I began eating whatever I wanted in front of others, I no longer wanted as many sweets because I no longer had anxiety that accompanied hiding it.

4. Queer Eye: We’re in Japan!

Lastly, this year I learned how to dress this new me that I was no longer ashamed of. I was already coming up with some ideas for outfits based on Megan Crabbe’s Instagram, but the final push came from Queer Eye: We’re in Japan!, the episode “Ideal Woman.”

The star of the episode was Kae, a young manga artist, who hid her waist and breasts under baggy clothes.