What kind of PROJECT is body acceptance?
According to the National Eating Disorder Association, body image is how you see yourself when you look in the mirror or when you picture yourself in your mind. It encompasses:
What you believe about your own appearance (including your memories, assumptions, and generalizations).
How you feel about your body, including your height, shape, and weight.
How you sense and control your body as you move. How you physically experience or feel in your body.
There are lots of reasons that, as a female-identifying person living in Western culture, you don’t like your body. Maybe this means that your body un-acceptance goes little further than grimacing when you get dressed and look in the mirror. Maybe your un-acceptance affects how you nourish your body (or don’t) or maybe your un-acceptance hinders your relationships because you aren’t comfortable enough in your skin to participate in things you would if you weren’t worried about your body.
Wherever you are in your relationship with your body, the words contained here will bring you ways of looking at yourself, your life, and your relationships that may vary from media that profits off of the idea that you must not look the way that you already do. These articles will provide additional resources, activities, and opportunities to do something we have all done at some point, even if fleeting: live carefree as ourselves, just as we are right now.
To be clear, body acceptance isn’t an end point. And it doesn’t mean that we can’t be interested in our bodies changing. (Women’s bodies ARE constantly changing -jeans not fitting one day, which did fit the day before is just a part of being a woman.) Our bodies will continue to shift, age, strengthen, weaken, get larger, smaller, slow down, and speed up through our lifetimes. And it is possible, as we marvel at our bodies’ ability to do all of this, to discover an acceptance, even an appreciation, for all that our bodies can do, no matter what form they take.
Welcome to the Body Acceptance Project.