Social media tells us we have to be skinny to be beautiful. So what do we do? We take supplements that should never enter our bodies. We curb our calories. And worst of all, we allow ourselves to starve out of what feels like desperation.
What you eat or don't eat affects more than just your body. It affects your mind also...
No one is exempt
I hosted a poll on my Instagram asking if people had ever intentionally restricted the amount of food they ate or starved themselves. The numbers were scary...
81% of participants said they had done at least one of these two things before. And what’s worth noting is that 23% of the 81% were males.
It's a myth that just females struggle with body image and unhealthy eating habits.
Skinny does not always mean healthy
Some people struggle with overeating, others have a hard time eating anything at all. The solution seems easy though; either eat less or eat more, right? The thing is, it’s not that simple. And no one of these polar opposites is more difficult than the other.
I used to have a hard time understanding how people would fall into eating disorders or bad relationships with food until I had to crawl my own way out of one...
Prioritize Your Health
You can do far more with a healthy mind and body than with an unhealthy one you think looks good.
Apart from the physical damage my body suffered from not eating enough food, my mental fatigue was a real struggle. I had a difficult time focusing in class and my mood was all over the place. And it was emotionally draining trying to get myself to physically eat. What made it worse is I was constantly finding everything that was “wrong” with my body.
I told one of my closest friends I started to have self-deprecating thoughts about what my body looked like and that even though I was working out intensely almost every day, I kept feeling weaker and weaker.
It was this conversation where my friend pointed out to me that I wasn’t eating enough, and I realized she was right.
I kept making excuses for why I didn't have time to eat or worse why I didn't have to eat. Yeah, you read that right. My friend was able to see something from the outside that I wasn’t able to make sense of on my own because I was trapped on the inside.
Be Your Beautiful
Beautiful is whatever makes you feel most beautiful, not what you think you have to look like in order to feel beautiful.
Social media is the biggest culprit of unrealistic beauty standards. We sometimes forget that beauty is not always about what's just on the outside... There's more to it. Read: So You Want to be More Attractive?
Please don't ever look in the mirror and treat yourself poorly because of what you think you see. Read: The Body Image Struggle
Takeaways:
Skinny does not always equal healthy.
Don’t diet, just make healthier choices.
Listen to your body. It speaks.
We all fight different battles. Comparing ourselves to each other is not how we win them.
I hope you enjoyed this post as we transition into health and body conversations for the rest of this month. Be kind to your body. It's the only one you get to live this life with.
Broken to Beautiful You. Where Your Pain Becomes Your Power.