Body Standards + Body Positivity

Hey everyone, welcome back to my blog!! I started my summer holidays last week and we have currently been living through a heatwave here in London. I have been doing work experience this week at a technology and business consulting firm called Capgemini. It's been really fun but I can't just help feeling a bit out of place and that I don't belong. That's probably because I don't seeing as everyone wants to go into professional services or computing whereas I could not be more different. Nevertheless, it's a great opportunity and I've met some great people. Many skills I've learnt can be transferred to other career paths and even just aspects of my philosophical journey. I have also been trying to tell myself that I don't need to be working in every free minute that I have in order to do well and taking breaks is allowed. It seems super harsh but somehow I've convinced myself I'm not getting into university which I've been told is definitely not true. Anyways, seeing as the weather is getting hotter, I thought I'd do the yearly body positivity talk I try to give around summer.

As someone who's grown up on the skinnier side, I've always been prone to a lot of skinny shaming so I just wanted to start this post off with saying that if you're telling people that they look good because they've lost weight, you're NOT giving them a compliment. What you are doing is reinforcing beliefs we have in our society which essentially mean that skinnier is better. You never know what a person has been through or what a person may be going through and if someone has gone through a bad time in order to reach what their current body looks like, you're reminding them that whatever destructive actions they may be doing is actually good for them because they'll be accepted by society. As for someone like me who's naturally skinny, I've always been told I'd look better with some 'meat on my bones' or that I look 'starved' and it's always made me feel a bit conscious. Even in regards to the fitness side of my life, I struggle to put on muscle and it makes me feel even worse.

The thing is that no matter what you look like, people will always be unhappy. Society will always be unhappy. If you're fat, you will be seen as unhealthy but if you're skinny, people will assume you're struggling with eating. No matter what you do, you won't be able to please everyone. There will always be people who support you but with the supporters will come haters. We as a society have managed to install such unrealistic body standards and some of these standards will take so many years of healing to uncondition. What I'm trying to get at here is that as a generation, we need to make a change. We can start to get over these stupid standards in place for men as well as women. Change cannot be brought overnight, it takes a long time. We can start off with small things like not commenting on people's bodies unless it's genuine concern for a serious matter. But mainly, we can stop talking harshly to ourselves and give ourselves some love.

I think a big part of body standards for me is set from the gym community. I love the gym community and have met some of the most insane people but alongside going to the gym comes a lot of body dysmorphia (not really me but many people I know). It also raises a lot of questions around what a healthy meal is because eating healthily includes eating unhealthy things. Everything in life is a balance. Furthermore, I see a lot of ballet dancers on my Instagram and while it's taken me a while to get comfortable in my body to a point where seeing all these 'perfect' bodies online, I just know there is a small girl out there wondering why she doesn't look the same. 

I'm going to end this on a better, slightly less depressing note. I say this to people all the time but I want you all to congratulate yourselves because you all have a summer body. You all have a swimming costume body. You all have a beach body. If you have a body and have a swimming costume on your body, then you have a summer body. I don't make the rules. It's time we started focusing on more important problems in today's society such as the lack of women's rights on their own bodies rather than deciding that we need to change in order to fit society. Bodies are bodies and they cannot be fit into boxes or categories, so why are we doing that? No two people will have the exact same body and it's about time we started to embrace it!!

I hope you enjoyed this week's post. I am not going to lie, I have had the worst ever writer's block, it has been so bad I haven't been able to even get some of my essays done for school. I procrastinated really badly on this post to the point where my dad and I were customising motorcycles that we would never buy in his office for an hour and a half. It is currently 12:38 am and I'm going to be uploading this once I wake up so I'm hoping I don't sound drowsy during this because I have no energy to proofread it, anyways, I hope you have a good week, love you guys <33