Break free from the pressure of the “Perfect Body”
How many experiences have I missed because I did not feel I had the perfect body? How many times have I put my well-being second to try to live up to a beauty ideal? How many times have I said I did not feel like it, when I really wanted to go, just so as not to show my body?
Loving yourself does not mean enslaving yourself.
If these questions resonate with you, stay with me for a moment.
We live in a society that is demanding with bodies. Beauty pressure affects many people, but today I want to speak especially to us, women: to those of us who have at some point felt that our body was being watched, judged or compared against an invisible measure of what it supposedly should be.
We are told to take care of ourselves and that health comes first, but at the same time we receive another, much quieter message: don’t forget your figure.
And when we talk about figure, we are not talking about manners. That mandate also accompanied many of the women before us. Today, in addition, the demand lands on the body: how it should look, how much it should weigh and which parts we should hide or transform.
In short: accepting your body does not mean you have to like every inch of it every day. It means your appearance stops deciding how much you are worth, what you can do, what you allow yourself to enjoy or how much right you have to take up space. The aim is not to go from hating your body to adoring it overnight, but to build a less punishing, more respectful relationship with it.
What does it mean to have a “valid body”?
Perhaps one of the first questions is precisely that: who decided which bodies are valid?
We often talk about the “perfect body” as if there were an objective reference. But beauty ideals change with times and cultures.
Having a valid body does not mean constantly submitting to restrictions to try to change it.
It does not mean spending the day negotiating with food.
It does not mean living glued to the scales, the mirror or whether a photo shows the angle we consider right.
And it does not mean having to always feel confident about our appearance.
Your body is already a valid body because it is the body from which you are living your life.
The difficulty appears when our worth becomes too tied to how we think others see us.
When body insecurity starts to shrink your life
Body insecurity does not always appear as an explicit thought of “I don’t like my body”.
Sometimes it slips into everyday decisions.
Not going to the beach.
Avoiding a swimming pool.
Not buying a garment we like because we think we “don’t have the body for it”.
Always trying to stand at the back in photographs.
Cancelling a plan because we feel nothing suits us.
Avoiding intimacy because we worry more about how our body will look than about what we are feeling.
We can try to change our body to feel freer and end up making our life smaller and smaller.
That is why an important question is not only “do I like my body?”, but:
“How much room is worrying about my body taking up in my life?”
Beauty pressure does not come only from inside you
When a woman feels insecure about her body it is easy to turn it into a purely individual problem: “I have low self-esteem”, “I’m too insecure”, “I should love myself more”.
But the way we look at the body is also socially built.
We grow up seeing which bodies get approval and which are criticised. We hear comments about weight from a young age and learn which parts of the body are supposedly to be hidden. We also see messages that link thinness, beauty, discipline, health and success as if they were the same thing.
That is why working on body image is not only about repeating positive phrases in front of the mirror.
It also means starting to recognise which messages we have internalised and deciding which ones we want to keep holding.
Taking care of yourself, or constantly trying to correct yourself?
There is an important difference between caring for the body and living in an attempt to correct it.
Care can include food, rest, movement, medical check-ups, pleasure, boundaries and attention to our needs.
Constant correction comes from another place:
“When I lose weight I’ll be fine.”
“When I get rid of this part of my body I’ll be able to wear that.”
“When I manage to control myself, then I’ll be able to feel proud.”
The problem is that the finish line can keep moving.
That is why it helps to ask ourselves:
“Am I doing this because it takes care of me, or because I need to feel my body deserves to be accepted?”
The same behaviour can have very different meanings.
Diets, bans and guilt
When the relationship with food is organised around rigid rules, it is easy to start dividing foods into moral categories: good and bad, allowed and forbidden, clean and “sinful”.
And then eating stops being just eating: it can become a test of who we are.
“I’ve been good.”
“I’ve behaved terribly today.”
“I’ll make up for it tomorrow.”
This logic can fuel cycles of restriction, loss of control, guilt and new attempts at control. The more rigid the relationship with food becomes, the more mental space it can take up.
That is why it is important to review not only what we eat, but also where we are making those decisions from.
Eating should not become a daily exam on our personal worth.
Because taking care of yourself is not the same as punishing yourself.
What if I can’t manage to love my body?
Here I want to pause on something important.
Sometimes the message “love your body” becomes just another demand. Perhaps you have spent years criticising it and now it seems you also have to look in the mirror and feel wonderful. It does not work like that.
There may be days when you do not like what you see.
There may be parts of your body you find hard to accept.
And that does not mean you are doing the process wrong.
Between hating the body and loving it there is a huge territory.
We can start by ceasing to attack it.
By talking about it with less contempt.
By dressing it without waiting for it to change.
By letting it take part in plans we used to avoid.
By asking ourselves what it needs, besides how it looks.
Sometimes the most realistic goal is not to love every part of our body, but to stop our life revolving around changing it.
Your body is not only an image
When body insecurity takes up a lot of space, we can end up watching the body almost exclusively from the outside.
How does it look?
How does this fit me?
What will someone who looks at me think?
But the body is much more than an image.
It is also sensation, movement, rest, desire, tiredness, strength, hunger, pleasure, pain, touch and presence.
Recovering a kinder relationship with it may mean moving from “how does my body look?” to asking ourselves:
“How am I in my body?”
“What do I need?”
“What makes me feel good?”
“What am I not doing for fear of being seen?”
Beyond the scales: reviewing what we have learned
We can ask ourselves what thinness means to us.
What do we associate with it?
Control? Success? Desirability? Discipline? Health?
And also what we have learned to associate with fatness.
We have heard and repeated many of those ideas for years. Reviewing them does not mean they disappear at once, but that we start to create space between the learned message and our own view.
Perhaps there we can ask ourselves:
“Do I want to keep measuring my worth by this standard?”
When can it be important to ask for help?
Worry about the body deserves special attention when it starts to significantly shape our eating, social life, intimacy, exercise, mood or the way we relate to ourselves.
Also when very rigid restrictions appear, episodes of loss of control with food, compensatory behaviours, intense fear of gaining weight or a body preoccupation that takes up much of the day.
In those cases, it is not simply a matter of “having more willpower” or learning to love yourself.
Specialist professional support may be needed, one that takes into account both the relationship with the body and food and psychological and physical well-being.
How can we support you at Calma de Ser?
Working on your relationship with your body is not about telling you how you should look or imposing a new list of rules.
It may mean understanding where that demanding gaze comes from, which messages you have internalised, what role control plays, how you relate to food and how much of your life you are putting on hold until you have the body you think you should have.
It may also mean recovering your own signals: hunger, fullness, pleasure, tiredness, boundaries and needs, always bearing in mind that when there is an eating disorder or a major disturbance of eating, the approach must be adapted to each case and may require coordination with other health professionals.
We do not want to offer you another ideal to reach.
We want to help you build a relationship with yourself in which care does not come from punishment.
Your life should not wait for your body to change
We may not be able to erase years of beauty pressure overnight.
But we can start asking ourselves how much more we want to keep giving it.
How many swims in the sea?
How many photographs?
How many get-togethers?
How much intimacy?
How much enjoyment?
Your body should not have to pass any exam to let you live.
Stop. Listen to yourself. And ask yourself what you would do today if, for a moment, you stopped thinking about how your body looks and could attend to how you want to live inside it.
