Unpopular Opinion: You Don't Have to Love Your Body

For years, the antidote to body shame has often been presented as body love. The treatment? Love your curves. Love your imperfections. Look in the mirror and tell yourself you're beautiful. And for some people, this can be genuinely liberating.

But I've always wondered whether asking someone who's spent years criticizing their body to suddenly love how it looks is asking them to stay in the same conversation. We're still looking at the body after all. Still evaluating it. Still deciding what we think about its appearance. We've just changed the hoped-for verdict from bad to beautiful.

When I work with clients on overcoming body shame, I find myself increasingly interested in a different question. What if freedom from body shame isn't learning to look at your body and love everything you see? What if it's caring a whole lot less about how it looks in the first place?

There is a concept in psychology called self-objectification. It describes what happens when we begin experiencing our bodies primarily as something that can be observed and evaluated by other people, rather than something we experience from within. Instead of simply being in our bodies, part of our attention is directed toward watching them. How do I look sitting like this? Can people see my cellulite? Is this angle flattering?

Over time, this can become a kind of self-surveillance, a constant background monitoring of our appearance. Women didn't collectively wake up one morning and decide to spend an astonishing amount of mental energy worrying about whether our arms look weird in photos. We learned that our appearance mattered, and we were rewarded for monitoring it. In fact, entire industries profit from making sure we don't get too comfortable.

I learned this particularly well. I grew up as a competitive figure skater and later performed professionally on cruise ships. My body was costumed, scrutinized, and quite literally part of my performance. Judges sat rinkside deciding how well I performed and whether I had pointed my toes enough (good grief). At the same time, I was also absorbing all the ordinary contradictions that come with growing up female. Our society has no shortage of opinions about what women’s bodies should look like. Be attractive, but not attention-seeking. Be skinny, but strong. Be desirable, but unaffected by others’ desire.

By my late teens and early twenties, I was struggling with an eating disorder. I became incredibly good at looking at myself from the outside. And incredibly disconnected from what it felt like to live on the inside. That distinction matters to me now, both personally and in the work I do with clients. Because when we talk about recovering from body shame, I don't think the goal is simply to become a kinder judge of ourselves. Maybe it's to step out of the judge's chair altogether.

Now let’s pause for a second and try something. Imagine holding your hand in front of you. You could examine it aesthetically. You might notice its shape, the length of your fingers, the different shades of your skin. You might notice the ridges in your nails, or the chipped polish. You could compare it with other hands and decide whether yours measures up. Heck, given enough time on the internet, I'm sure you could find someone to sell you a program to make your fingers look younger.

Or…hear me out, you could think about everything those hands have allowed you to experience. Your hands have held people you love. They've scratched dogs in exactly the right spot until their leg starts twitching. They've felt refreshing lake water and clasped warm coffee mugs. They've made mouth-watering food, opened countless doors, written beautiful words that changed someone’s life, wiped away tears, played instruments, climbed mountains, and created things that didn't exist before you made them.

Suddenly, whether your hands are beautiful becomes a fairly uninteresting question.

I wonder what would happen if we extended that same indifference to the rest of our bodies. Your legs don't exist primarily to look good in shorts. They carry you toward the people and places you love. Your arms reach and carry and embrace. They let you pull someone closer in times of need. Your lungs have been quietly breathing you through every ordinary and extraordinary and devastating moment of your life. And on days when you were certain you couldn't possibly do one more thing, they took another breath anyway.

Your body is not just something that can be seen. It is how you get to experience being alive.

So maybe apathy isn’t such a bad thing. We don't usually associate apathy with healing. But when it comes to appearance, I think a little apathy might actually be incredibly freeing. I’m not talking about neglect or disconnection. And I certainly don’t mean that we hate our bodies and don’t care what happens to them. What I mean is, your body looks like your body today. Okay. Move on. You don't have to call your stretch marks beautiful or gaze lovingly at your reflection every morning. Maybe some days you simply don't care very much. And maybe that's progress. Because imagine what becomes available when your appearance stops being one of the most interesting things about you.

There is also an important difference between appreciating your body and appreciating how your body looks. One still asks us to evaluate the object. The other invites us back into the experience. Instead of asking, How do I look today?, what if we sometimes asked: What did my body let me experience today? Maybe you felt the exquisite relief of taking off your bra at the end of the day - a sensation deserving far more poetry than it has historically received. Maybe you felt the crunch of leaves underneath your shoes, someone's fingers intertwined with yours, or the particular comfort of finally finding the cold side of the pillow. These aren't consolation prizes for not having the body you wish you had. This is what the body was for all along.

There may always be days when we don't particularly like what we see.

Bodies change. They age. They scar. They soften. They stretch and wrinkle. Sometimes they recover, and sometimes they don't. They carry us through celebration, heartbreak, pregnancy and loss, illness and adventure, exhaustion and joy, and thousands upon thousands of completely ordinary Tuesday afternoons. We don't have to find all of it beautiful.

Beauty was never the only thing our bodies had to offer us.

For me, healing has meant becoming less interested in watching myself live and more interested in actually being here for it. And when I sit with clients who have spent years monitoring, shrinking, criticizing or fighting their bodies, I'm less interested in figuring out how to make them love what they see. I’m much more interested in what might become possible if they didn’t have to think about what they looked like quite so much.

Perhaps body freedom isn't looking in the mirror one day and finally thinking, I love what I see. Perhaps it's catching your reflection, barely giving it a thought, and continuing on with your day. Because there is somewhere you want to go. Something you want to taste. Someone you want to hold. A song you want to dance to. A dog waiting impatiently for some snuggles. Because you are much more interested in experiencing your life than watching and scrutinizing what it looks like.