Body Positivity: Celebrating Diversity in Beauty Standards
Every day, every minute, every second, there are people who don’t feel comfortable in their own skin because of these unrealistic expectations formed in society, cultivated through social media and other forms of advocacy. People, especially teenagers, feel a type of pressure to be a certain way, causing depression and insecurities to form when unable to meet standards that they shouldn’t be held to. It is important to understand that everybody is different; beauty comes in different fonts and that is ok.
It can be hard sometimes to process the fact that it is impossible to fit a forever-changing trend. Trying to do something as damaging as this can lead to severe problems with mental health, one’s own image of themselves, eating disorders, and other dangerous conditions. There are a few essential goals to practicing body positivity including having higher self-esteem and confidence, challenging society’s norms, and promoting body types and diversity of all kinds.
As described earlier, there are a number of problems associated with a lack of acceptance about one’s body including:
Depression: Having trouble accepting body image is directly correlated with depression and a worsened emotional well-being. It can be hard to deal with this, especially if pressure and stress builds up. It’s extremely important to understand that constantly putting yourself down can be so unhealthy and you are doing nothing but harming yourself.
Low Self-Esteem: This occurs especially in teenagers, increasing chances of depression and anxiety. As trends continue to change, people feel pressure to meet them and when they don’t meet these impossible standards, it can lead to declines in confidence and self-esteem.
Eating Disorders: Data has shown that in an attempt to fit a certain body type, many people, especially young girls develop eating disorders and an unhealthy relationship with food, once again causing a vicious cycle of depression, anxiety, and even posing a risk to physical health. It can take a lot to battle eating disorders, and develop a normal and healthy pattern with diets again.
So what do you do to prevent it? How can we start celebrating diversity in beauty standards and encourage body positivity? But most importantly, how can we begin to implement it ourselves, so we can respect and appreciate ourselves in our own skin?
Cultivating small habits including just repeating small self-affirmations every morning, or giving yourself room to breathe can go a long way. They can help you have a good day and in the long-term, build confidence and positivity. And by learning to accept ourselves as enough, we’ll end up being more inclusive of others, leading to the development of a beautifully diverse and positive society.
Challenging your own mindset and what you see. This may sound relatively straightforward but in reality, this part is what most people struggle with. When we see something on social media, such as instagram, we tend to just automatically believe the information. This can cause us to have unrealistic expectations about other people, and even ourselves. This might lead to bad relationships with food, self-criticism, and other long-term problems. However, this can be changed if we start to question the accuracy, credibility, and overall content of something. Understanding our own thought processes and practicing awareness can help us fix insecurity and mental health problems in general.
Body’s function over looks. A simple fix of shifting focus from the way your body looks to the way it is able to do things can significantly help lift one’s body image and help them appreciate others’ diversity as well. For instance, instead of looking at the weight of one’s body, and instead concentrating on how much it is able to maintain health and function on a daily purpose, we shift our mindsets to be much more healthy. In addition to us becoming much more positive people ourselves, we also learn to develop habits that will improve function and that are not for the purpose of achieving unrealistic standards. For instance, instead of exercising to get the “perfect” body, it would be done to keep the body fit and healthy.
To conclude, by trying some of these habits and just working to change some of our thought processes, we can grow to be more accepting of ourselves as well as of others. This way, we can encourage a beautifully diverse community and society in general while becoming better people ourselves. This will help with confidence and positivity levels and help celebrate the fact that people are not going to fit neatly into these categories and beauty standards which is ok.
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