A letter to my past body and a note-to-self for my future body:

Powerful, sacred, capable, hardworking, beautiful, resilient. These are all descriptors I use to describe my body but I haven't always been so complimentary of it. In fact, I'm still not some of the time and I probably won't be in the future. And I'm here to tell you that that's okay.

The business of self-love is complicated and often times, full of fluff. Those who preach it typically don't believe it or even scratch the surface of their own self-love. We are raised in a society that over-sexualizes women yet over-shames them for being sexual, vocal, or enterprising. We are constantly exposed to images of women that massive corporations decided had the "perfect" body to market their product or service. And even then, these already "perfect" women are photoshopped to an unrecognizable degree. We are programmed to micro-analyze people and within three seconds can pick out every single external flaw they have and slot them in to categories, "too skinny", "hourglass", "thick", "baby weight". Most of the time, these snap judgments come unwarranted and unprovoked. Its human nature to categorize people but society has molded our preconceived ideas of what we slot as "good" and "bad".

So if the perfect body is a construction of society, why are we looking for it in ourselves? Some of you reading this may be thinking, "I don't need the perfect body, I just need to lose 10 pounds." That's doing the same thing. And the problem is that a lot of the time when we think that phrase we tack on, "and then I'll be happy." No matter what your version of this situation is, my point is that you've got to stop saying "I would like my body IF" because even if you reach your goal weight, or get a boob job, or build some coveted arm muscle, you still won't be happy. Because you didn't love yourself first. It's comparable to the saying you hear in cheesy rom-com movies or the advice your friend's therapist told her: how can you find love if you don't love yourself first? If you don't find that love within yourself you can't be happy with another person--the same is true for your body. Only when you truly love your body and embrace your flaws will you be okay in those less-than-perfect moments. You don't always have to be happy with it but but if you love it, you'll recognize that you're in a rough patch, ride it out, and move on rather than falling into a trap of self-hatred.

This isn't to say you shouldn't pursue your goals as it relates to your body, in fact the opposite is true. I encourage you to run that extra mile, focus on your weight loss goals, or sculpt your physique with muscle. But the flaw with any goal-oriented person is the tendency to become overly critical, even if its for the purpose of getting better. Only from a place of love and acceptance of the body you are already living in are you able to change it and love it just as ferociously. Stop leaning on the mentality that your body issues are different than anyone else's because that's the way you're wired. Recognize that the more you honor that frame of thinking, the more you'll believe it. Reclaim the business of self-love and write your own vision statement for it that acknowledges that you'll have ups and downs but most importantly, equilibrium.