How I’m Getting Comfortable In This Body
By: Kae Smith
Tags: Health, Body Image, Self Love, Love, Society

I want to tell you I have answers.

This rage, this terrible, heart wrenching feeling affects far too many goddamn people, and the reasons as to why range from ridiculous societal expectations to social media. But there’s no perfect ending to this feeling.

Disordered eating and negative body image don’t simply fall away.

It’s hard to tell what changed the tide — it’s not as if I got magically better. There are weeks that go by where I change my clothes four times before work to find something that both hides my ‘flaws’ and makes me comfortable. I still lift up my shirt and peek at my stomach when I pass mirrors in my house (I’m not proud of that). Sometimes I can’t eat certain foods, my hear clenches when the Boyfriend suggests making cookies after work because I know I will eat them…

So no, I don’t have answers. But there are things in my life now that I didn’t have before that I have every reason to believe acted as catalyst towards a better relationship with the physique I live within.

I’d like to tell people it was all mantras and positive thinking, but the truth is that it was a lot of work, and a re-evaluation of both food and exercise (which means confronting the fact that how I ate and moved prior was either a) not good enough or b) not consistant enough to show actual progress. Which then means looking at whether my issues are mental or actually physical. I still don’t know. Moving on.).

A Positive Relationship with Food

This means a lot of different things to a lot of different people. To me, it meant parting ways with veganism, and learning to understand a) what made me feel good and b) how much food was the right amount for me.

I’d spent seven years either eating far too little in an attempt to loose weight or far too much in a weird combination of binge eating and mixed up hunger cues.

I’m still trying to understand how to look at food: is it fuel or pleasure?

This one is a work in progress. But it helps.

Exercising for Pleasure, Not Progress

In my first year of university I would spend a hour every morning in the dingy free weights room, trying to both build muscle and loose weight in a desperate attempt to look and feel better. I hated it.

The two things that slowly started to change my relationship with exercise, and subsequently, my body, were rock climbing and mountain biking. If you love what you’re doing, you’ll do it more. If those things you love are fucking tough on your body and make you sore and happy and exhausted, well hey, it will probably have some positive affects on your body and your mind.

When you get on the bike, your body is no longer something you can judge or prod with negative intent; it’s powerful, it’s motion.

Gaining Confidence

There’s no special recipe for this, but you learn how to find it. Red wine makes me confident, so does long days on the bike. Sometimes if I catch a glimpse of that sharp line of muscle up my thigh I feel it sparking inside me.

This is a give and take, it’s a learning curve.

Sometimes I jot down a few things that make me feel good, and peek at the list on my not-so-good days.

Examples: that one outfit with the black jeans and boots, when you match the Boyfriend doing pushups, that settled feeling of your feet perfectly positioned on your bike pedals …

Learning to Love Yourself

That’s really all it is, when you look at objectively. Feeding yourself properly. Moving your body, treating it well. Giving yourself the respect you deserve, figuring out what makes you, as an individual, feel confident and sexy and loved.

So I’m learning.