Body Image & Yoga
Healing one’s relationship to food and self-image takes time, patience, and commitment. I know because I have done the work myself, and continue to work on it always. In the process, it’s usually the body acceptance that comes last. It’s extremely frustrating, but it makes sense.
I started comparing my body to other girls at a very early age, around 8 years old. I’d notice if my legs looked bigger compared to theirs. I always associated skinny with good and fat with bad. I can’t tell you what exactly made me believe this, but I’m positive it was an influence of several things including media, family values…our culture in general. I absorbed the message that being fat will make you the punchline of jokes, was not desirable by the opposite sex, was equated with laziness, a lack of will-power, or meant you were not trying hard enough. This message is still very alive, in fact sometimes I think its more alive than ever with social media playing a large role. Bringing awareness to my own judgements around body size has been eye opening, and forced me to take a deeper look into the truth around health and body size.
I was taught that foods were good or bad, healthy or unhealthy. Growing up, some foods were allowed in the house and other foods were not. This usually included any sort of candy, snack foods, dessert, anything chocolate. It was diet culture in full force, imprinting my mind with what I should and should not be eating in order to be thin, to be accepted, to be “healthy”.
It took a long time for me to stop associating foods as good or bad. Sometimes I still do it subconsciously, but I’m working on placing all foods on an even playing ground. To not feel guilt or shame around enjoying something I would have once stayed away from and instead felt constantly deprived. Noticing how foods make me feel and if they are satisfying. It’s still a work in progress as this has been something ingrained in me throughout life, but it’s bringing enjoyment back to my eating experiences.
Body Image can be much harder to heal and may take more time than the relationship to food, as it has for myself. Since I’ve strived for thinness almost all of my life, how do you just…stop? How do you stop comparing yourself? To actresses, models, anyone on social media, friends, strangers, etc? To stop valuing yourself based on what size jeans you wear or what number the scale says?
Yoga has been an important tool for me in this process. In the beginning, about 12 years ago, yoga was just another form of fitness for me, another way to work out, burn calories. It wasn’t until I joined a studio when I lived in NYC that I started to feel it was more. I started noticing emotions arise during savasana, as it gave me a time to reflect, to just be with myself and let the practice sink in. I had never really given myself that time before, to just…be. As I continue to practice, and found more teachers who inspired me, I began to think of yoga in a new light.
I began to notice how I used to ignore negative feelings and emotions, push them down, distract myself from them. And what easier way to do this than to focus on my body? To busy my mind with what I was eating or not eating, exercising, looking a specific way. There was limited time to deal with other things, more important things.
Yoga allowed me to reconnect my mind to my body. To be in my body instead of analyzing and judging it from the outside. To grow respect for it, to listen to it, to learn to love it and be grateful for it. Freeing my mind from the worry of body image is my ultimate goal. To no longer waste my time here on this planet worrying about what size I wear or how I compare to other women. I know I will continue to work on this throughout my life, because, unfortunately, the pressure is everywhere you look. But my yoga practice seems to always put things back in perspective. Reminding me of what is truly important to me. And the size of my body just isn’t one of them, anymore.
Dianna