Originally published 12/9/18 via WordPress
I'm not shy about my anti-diet message.
I’m a strong advocate of body acceptance and believe we're better served to derive self-worth from our inner values rather than outer appearance. It's not always easy to practice what I preach, but I'm committed to trying my best.
Last month, I got married. It was an incredible milestone that I will remember with joy forever. However, in the months leading up to our big day, I found my inner Anti-Diet Warrior was challenged in some new ways. Today I want to share how my experience as a bride challenged my resolve and offer some guidance for those of you preparing for your wedding or any other big life event.
In our beauty-obsessed culture, the message (particularly for women) is that those who fit the standards of beauty (thin, tanned, clear complexioned, young, white, and confident but not too confident) are most worthy of love and admiration. Everywhere we turn, there are products and services geared towards “fixing” various aspects of our natural appearance to achieve this worthy ideal. Apparently, there is not just an ideal woman, there’s also an ideal bride: thin, tanned, clear complexioned, bright eyed, effortless. Basically, she’s just a lace-covered, amped up version of the same beauty standard that’s promoted in everyday life. But she is special because all eyes are on her.
Weddings are one-time events, so even if most of us can’t achieve the ideal in everyday life, we’re taught that we can still make ourselves the ideal bride, by temporarily pouring money, time, and energy into pre-wedding diet and beauty regimens and achieving perfection for that one magical day. In fact, it’s so common for brides to aggressively diet in advance of the wedding that there’s a term for the practice: Brideorexia.
I’m grateful I get to work with clients who bravely recover from eating disorders every day. My job protected me from Brideorexia and motivated me to stay balanced. I didn’t want to compromise my professional integrity, and I wanted to treat my body with compassion. So I made a pledge to myself when we got engaged. I swore that I would not alter my eating habits or physical activities in preparation for the wedding.
Turned out, keeping my promise was harder than I expected. A few months before the wedding, a back injury forced me to step back from my usual physical activities. I knew I had to respect my body’s need for rest, but my brain was suddenly telling me to compensate. The inner critic said I should probably “just diet a little” since the wedding was coming up. What the heck, brain?
Every day, I held tight to this mantra: My body is the least interesting thing about me. When I saw anything that tried to convince me otherwise, I was quick to hit “unfollow” or change the channel. When my own thoughts tried to convince me otherwise, I sought support or did some journaling. When people wanted to discuss their diets, I would change the subject. When the girl doing my bridal alterations suggested that we wait to finish “in case I wanted to lose any weight,” I politely assured her that wasn’t in the plans.
It’s important to note that I have the privilege of living in a naturally smaller body. While this doesn’t make me immune from bad body image days (nobody is), it means I was not really hit with judgments or stigma from the outside world for choosing not to shrink my body before the wedding.
A sad truth in our weight-biased culture is that many brides (and non-brides) in larger bodies are subjected to more overt pressures and messaging to change themselves. My experience, while challenging thanks to my inner critic and a lifetime of absorbing social messages, was just a fraction of what many people face on a daily basis.
The paradigm overall needs to change. We need to stop reinforcing women for their appearance and promoting an unrealistic “ideal” that hardly anybody fits into naturally. While this seems like a long journey (and it is!) it starts with each of us at the individual level. Read on for some tips to get you started.
Rejecting Unhelpful Ideals of Beauty
My advice to anyone struggling with appearance-based insecurities (pre-wedding or otherwise) is to consider the messages surrounding you.
Become a critical consumer of media. Are the TV shows, movies, commercials, podcasts, and blogs you frequent promoting things to alter your appearance? Are they insinuating you’ll be happier as a result of “fixing” something (body hair, acne, body fat, wrinkles, under-eye circles, or any of the millions of nuances of being a human)? Are they emphasizing what you look like as a reflection of how you’re doing in life?
Notice how social media makes you feel. When you’re consuming social media, how are you feeling? Do you feel negatively towards yourself? Do you compare yourself to the accounts you follow? If someone you loved saw this same account, how do you think it would make them feel about themselves? Also, remember that you cannot tell how healthy, successful, or satisfied a person is based on their appearance.
Messages also come from the people around us. Do your friends, family members, and coworkers make you feel insecure about how you look? Do they talk about themselves in negative or self-critical ways? Often, body shaming can feel like a bonding activity, especially among groups of women. Notice if you find yourself joining in just because it’s an easy way to connect.
Catch yourself judging others based on appearance, whether praise (I wish I had her thighs!) or criticism (that haircut is horrible on her). Ask yourself, what would I say if I didn’t comment on appearance right now? What else would I notice and appreciate? If you've been taught to value being beautiful and to take pride in your appearance, this exercise is tough. It's eye-opening to learn how instinctively we comment on someone's looks.
While we can’t completely avoid the pressure to “fix” the parts of ourselves that society has deemed to need fixing, we can be critical consumers. We can get angry when faced with this messaging, and speak up when people around us are spewing these messages (however well-intentioned they might be). None of us owes the world an altered version of ourselves.
In conclusion, this stuff is complicated.
It would be a flat-out lie to say that I didn’t get pleasure out of having fancy hair and makeup, a gorgeous dress, and sparkly shoes at my wedding. It was really fun. In our human brains that love to categorize things as “right” or “wrong,” it’s tough to let there be a middle ground. In some ways, reveling in how pretty I looked made me feel like a hypocrite and a failure as an anti-diet clinician. My brain told me I’m supposed to give the middle finger to the mirror, but in my heart, I admitted I wanted to feel beautiful. I decided to give myself permission to participate in the beauty traditions, without judging myself either way.
Listening to what I felt I “should” do to reject beauty standards would have diminished my enjoyment of this once-in-a-lifetime experience. Each of us has to figure out what’s most authentic to ourselves. If you derive pleasure from the primping, good for you! If you hate it, don’t do it! For me, the key was remembering that there's no right or wrong. It’s okay to invest energy in how you look, and it’s also okay not to.
Remember that the wedding, beauty, and diet industries are each raking in billions of dollars every year by convincing you that you need to look a certain way. Think about whether buying a service or product will truly lead to a happier experience. If you want to amp up your workouts or whiten your teeth or get a spray tan, you do you, girl. Choosing to alter your appearance is not the problem; the problem is believing that youneed to alter your appearance to be worthy of validation.
When you stop acting like appearance is the most interesting thing about yourself or other people, you start to see more. You start to recognize the emotion on someone’s face, without giving attention to the wrinkles or spots. You start to appreciate the deeper, more meaningful things. And when you look at photos from one of the happiest days of your life, you’ll see the joy and love, regardless of how your face and body looked.
The researchers at Beauty Redefined said it best: your body is an instrument, not an ornament. If you need some help navigating this stuff, I’m here for you. You deserve freedom from looks-based judgments on your wedding day and every day.