Beauty & thin-ness. Why do they hold such value in our society?⠀
Last summer, my 6-year-old daughter was a bridesmaid for her aunt & uncle.⠀
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It was a beautiful day. And if you can’t celebrate beauty at a wedding, when can you?
But as a female and a feminist, I squirmed slightly at the constant comments my daughter received that day.
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There was nothing out of the ordinary & nothing that wasn’t hugely appreciated by my daughter. Who wouldn’t want to see a 6-year-old happy, as she was told she was beautiful again & again?
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That’s the job of a bridesmaid, after all. Who could possibly take offence?
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I didn’t take offence & short–term, it’s lovely to see my daughter so happy. But I DO worry about the message we are still giving to our young girls.⠀
And if this message was an isolated moment in time, I wouldn’t be writing this blog.
But even at 6, my daughter is subjected to daily messaging about her looks – from comments people make, to the dolls that she plays with & the marketing she is subject to.
I can’t shield my daughter from the world that we live in (and nor do I want to).
But I do want to help her & help others as they grow older, to know their worth is so more than just the shape and look of their body.
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Girls are essentially told “you are your looks” from a very young age. It’s no wonder we grow up to be so critical of ourselves.⠀
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According to a study funded by the British Government, 24% of 14-year-old girls have depression. Are the messages we are feeding these girls partly to blame? Undoubtedly, yes.⠀
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Body size & shape fall under this banner. Are we encouraging our girls to be critical of their own bodies, as they see us be critical of our own? Are we encouraging them to strive for perfection just as we do? And is this really what we want for them?
The easiest compliment to give…
I strive every day to talk to my daughter about her value on the inside. About her self-resilience. About her energy & inquisitiveness; about her love of art and her ability to make others happy through her kindness.
I get it’s hard and it takes practice. Because the easy compliment to give to a little girl, is about how pretty she looks.
But the problem is much, much bigger than just girls being objectified or women & girls self-objectifying themselves.
Because if part of our brain is constantly worried about how we look, we are distracted from everything else in life. Studies show that girls who worry about how they look perform worse in exams & on the sports field, because they are distracted.
We need to change the story…
Self-love, self-compassion and self-worth are at the center of what I work on with the women who come to me, wanting to change their relationship with food & with their body.
It is so important to me that we change the narrative for young girls, so they can really live up to their full potential.
I hope to be part of the solution to this problem by helping the significant women in these young girls lives – their mothers, aunts and grandmas – with the way they think & feel about their own bodies.
When women come to me for coaching, weight loss tends to be part of the goal and I support that. I also support that there may be an aesthetic goal as part of that too.
But it can’t be everything. We must recognize how significant we are as humans, without fixating on the aesthetics of our body.
We must also change the story about the what a healthy female looks like. Because thin and pretty does not equal health.
Part of my inspiration for spreading this message comes from power twins Lexi and Lynsey Kite, from Beauty Redefined. I have part of their core message on my office wall to remind me every day:
“Loving your body isn’t believing your body looks good. It is knowing your body is good, regardless of how it looks. Loving your body isn’t thinking you are beautiful. it is knowing you are more than beautiful. Loving your body is understanding that your body is an instrument for your use, not an ornament to be admired”
Wow. How powerful is that!
The diet industry is the antithesis to this. We’re bombarded with messages that are the exact opposite – to sell us the latest fad, the next pill to ‘fix’ us or the before and after pictures.
They all carry the same message. You are not good enough. You need to look different. Buy my stuff!
A message worth sharing…
One of the things that makes me happiest when I speak to my clients, is when they tell me how they are sharing what we are working on with their kids.
When a mum tells me she ate chocolate brownie with her 6-year-old & described all the wonderful things they noticed about eating it. Teaching her daughter how to tune into the experience of eating, how to enjoy food & how to tune into her body’s natural hunger cues.
Or when a mum shares with her teenage daughter what she has learnt about the marketing tactics being used on them in supermarkets.
If you are on a diet and you have to hide it from your 6-year-old or your teenager – then don’t subject YOUR body and mind to it, either.
If you need evidence that you are more than your body, ask the people around you what they love about you. I bet they don’t mention anything about how you look.
And if you want to go one step further & really work on your relationship with food and your body, then please do reach out to me or join our free Facebook community, Healthy Life ME.
Until next time,
Fran