Love Your Body Day
Chances are if you’ve been awake for more than an hour, you’ve already seen the ads for the latest fat-disintegrating weight loss pill, the best kept, age-old secret to youthful skin, and a heap of cosmetic products guaranteeing professional results. With the flickering ads on TV and the cover models screaming at us from the grocery store check-out, it’s nearly impossible to escape them all.
Now, it doesn’t matter how sensible someone is; the sheer desperation to “fit the mold” can easily overpower our rationales. Thus, generations of women have spent a generous amount of time and money stocking their medicine cabinets with enough pills and chemical remedies to start their own pharmacies.
Jamia Mei Tolentino Valenzuela City, Philippines
Sadly, the beatings we sustain as a result of these images of “perfect beauty” are not limited to our wallets. Our souls and our concepts of individuality and worth suffer the most damage, and all too many women are caught in a web of self-deprecation and shame. Not a pretty picture (excuse the pun).
October is a month to celebrate womanhood, and to continue this tradition, the National Organization for Women (NOW) calls us all to plug our ears, burn our magazines (controlled fires only, please) and celebrate their annual Love Your Body Day by doing just that. We’ve been asked to forgive our imperfections and appreciate the incredible machines that allow us to wake up in morning and accomplish everything from spreading peanut butter on bread to managing a fortune 500 company, and to help ring in the celebration, I’d like to share one of the many lessons I learned from my days as a personal trainer.
I had the great fortune of working with two elderly sisters that seemed to be able to overcome all of life’s obstacles with the cunning use of sarcasm. After four weeks, neither had seen the drastic changes they were expecting, but what I saw taking place within them was astonishing. Always quick to smile, they began approaching challenges with greater confidence (and a little less cynicism), until one day, after always needing assistance to get up off the floor, the two sat up and bounced to their feet…literally bounced.
Years later, I can’t recall how much weight they lost, but that moment – which ended in hugs, tears, and a lesson in resiliency that I have since referred back to whenever I find myself criticizing my thighs and butt – has stayed with me.
It’s true the road of self-deprecation leads absolutely no where, but I suspect we’ve all found ourselves there from time to time, comparing our own bits and pieces to those in the magazines and evaluating where we fall short. Love Your Body Day reminds us to take a step back from the mirror, not because we look better from a distance, but to gain perspective. And really, ladies…do we want to be remembered for how we look or who we are? Most days, the answer is pretty clear.
“This post is part of the 2011 Love Your Body Day Blog Carnival”