Bite-Sized Body Positivity
By: The Rhinestone
Tags: Health, Diet, Racism, Body Image, Mental Health

Whoa-ho-ho, Merry December! Look who’s back with another blog.

This one is a little bittersweet.

cw: mental health, racism, body image, eating disorders

After attending therapy at UCSF for three years, I am having my last appointment in two weeks. I am so eternally, incredibly grateful for both my therapists (s/o Ashley and Allison!) and the opportunity to have learned so much about how to shape my perception.

Therapy work (and a bit of medication to start) took a reactive, clinically anxious and depressed, people-pleasing frog… and turned her into a confident, rational, communicative, boundary-setting princess.

So naturally as my therapy sessions come to a close, I’m feeling a bit reflective. And as usual, I had an epiphany tonight which prompted me to write this blog.

I’ll start with this: One of the most important things I learned in therapy was how to break life down into bite-sized pieces.

The first step was to stop thinking and speaking in all-or-nothing generalizations.

“I had the worst week.” “I feel like I suck as a dance teacher.” “I didn’t exercise at all this week.” It took a lot of practice to stop. At first, it took my therapist calling them out for me. Then eventually I started to catch them myself. “Oh yeah, when I said this last week, she told me it was generalizing. So I need to phrase it differently.” We would come up with a more rationally balanced thought. I usually had to talk this through aloud or write it down.

It wasn’t “the worst week ever,” it’s just a week. I had a fight with a friend, but I stood up for myself, which I hadn’t done in previous instances.

I’m not failing as a dance teacher — I get good feedback, even though attendance is low, which is due to a lot of factors.

I DID get exercise today — I took a walk, and even though it wasn’t a 30 minute HIIT workout, it still counts as exercise.

As time went on, I got better at this and now, I can usually do the whole process in my head before the words even leave my mouth. Gradually it changed the way I viewed the world around me, which led to behavioral changes — the best part.

I’m slowly un-learning my all-or-nothing approach to life.

That generalizing mentality I mentioned? I applied it to actions, too. It was all-or-nothing. Failure or success.

Growing up, no one around me understood when I had anxiety attacks over learning new gymnastics skills. They didn’t understand why I had so much trouble studying. They didn’t get why I wasn’t able to just completely cut carbohydrates out of my diet and lose weight.

I turned all this inward, and came to the conclusion that I was flawed. I lacked discipline, I lacked conviction. I was weak. I hated that I could never seem to achieve my goals.

I was incapable of acknowledging little wins, or even positive traits about myself, because I was so focused on my failings. It painted a very bleak, dark picture in my head of all my goals — like slick walls, 10 feet high, with no handholds or breaks on the way up.

But through therapy I finally realized that the “result” is whatever the fuck you want it to be.

Attainable goals is the magic phrase. You want to get stronger. You have trouble finding time for working out every day. Do ten minutes instead of thirty. Still too much? Do five. The more tiny goals you can reach more frequently, the easier to build the habit, and you can always try to increase it later.

I’m the happiest that I’ve ever been in my life because I’m actually able to set attainable goals and meet them now. And I also learned that I really need to fucking CELEBRATE my wins. Focusing on failures, which I did for years and years, mostly just discouraged me. Focusing on wins made the world seem a little brighter and made me feel a little more capable.

Society and industry tell us that we need the “quick fix.” They tell us that the only thing holding us back is a lack of motivation. I’m here to tell you that that’s complete and utter BULLSHIT.

Struggling to set and achieve goals is normal, and you have every right to break your goals down into the smallest possible chunks, and still celebrate yourself and your successes every step of the way.

It’s a process that I’m still figuring out, so it doesn’t come as a surprise that it took me a while to realize I can apply this same “bite-sized” mentality to my current mission— self-acceptance.

Quarantine was an incredible period of time for me because it exposed me to some truths that I wonder if I’d have ever found, had life continued on as normal. I was spending a lot of time on social media and I learned a LOT of information that completely changed the way I thought about body positivity and dieting.

I learned that fat-phobia and body discrimination have roots in racism and very little to do with actual health concerns. (And also, that the body positivity movement was started by plus-sized black women before it was overrun by medium-sized and skinny white women). I learned that diets have a catastrophic failure rate — that 83% (some sources say higher) of people who go on diets end up gaining the weight back or even more in the following two years. Not only that, but diets are a leading factor in development of disordered eating. A lot of these statistics involved teens and young adults, which was my experience as well. And sorry, despite my hope in an earlier blog, Noom is also a form of dieting, because its main focus is weight loss. I learned that the weight loss industry is a $72 billion market that makes its money off of convincing you that being fat is the worst possible thing you can be. Through following more body positivity activists, I started to discover all of the sneaky fucking ways that this industry preys on your self esteem. The one that blew my mind the most? CGI models. Google it. It’s creepy as fuck. And they’re not legally required to disclose when they use it. I learned that more and more doctors, dieticians, and medical professionals are joining the Health At Every Size Movement (HAES) and ditching the ridiculous use of BMI in determining health.

(you can see some sources for these statistics at the bottom of this article.)

All of these discoveries made me extremely motivated to love my body more, to push myself to be a good role model in the body positivity community — not just because I want to be happy, but because I want to give a giant middle finger to oppression and discrimination.

But of course it’s fucking hard. I’ve been working to embrace intuitive eating, but there’s some times when I still feel major food guilt. I’ve been working to become strong without losing weight as the focus, but my mind drifts to daydreams about living in my skinny body again. I have some days where I’m okay with my body, and some days where I’m just overcome by disgust. And sometimes, I feel shame that I’m trying to be part of this movement but I’m still afraid to show certain parts of my body, while other body positivity influencers are unapologetically showing everything.

I curated my social media feeds to be more diverse and show different body types, but I’m constantly searching for models who look exactly like my body type so I can feel like I belong, like it’s okay to exist the way that I am. I especially look for boudoir shots of models who might look like me, so that I can see someone being sexy at my size and feel like I could be sexy too.

Then yesterday, like a light bulb, I had two epiphanies in a row.

Firstly —It dawned on me that I could be a LOT better about acknowledging my wins. I post one photo of my belly on social media, that’s a win, even if I don’t do it all the time! I dance wearing a shirt that shows my arms, that’s a win, even if no one else sees me! I’m the farthest thing from a bad role model… I’m learning, and it’s okay to learn, and to not be perfect.

And secondly — I realized that I don’t need to comb Instagram for photos of plus-sized models who have my EXACT body type so that I can feel seen and sexy. The whole point of the body positivity movement is celebrating uniqueness and diversity. Why am I here waiting around for a model, when I could be the model?

I know I’m not the only one of my body type. If I am having trouble finding representation, that means others probably are too. And I can fill that gap. So I took some photos, and I resolved to post them unapologetically. I hope someone sees them and feels inspired the way I’ve felt inspired by all of the other plus-sized models out there who have helped me to accept my body in its current form.

thank goodness for ring lights and self-timers lol

And meanwhile, I reminded myself that if I post these and then feel some shyness and body shame later and don’t want to show my body, that’s okay, too.