3 Steps to *Loving* Your Bikini Body

We hear it for pretty much 8 months out of the year: “Summer bodies are made in winter!” “Get your body bathing-suit ready!”

This kind of messaging really irks me because it implies that something needs to be different about our bodies in summer.

It implies that a body in summer, when the temps are higher and we are wearing fewer clothes, has to look a certain way in order to be aesthetically pleasing to the eyes of other people. When we buy into that, we are completely disempowering ourselves and discounting the power and function of our bodies. (Not to mention putting ourselves at victim to the latest societal definition of beauty.)

GUESS WHAT?

Your body doesn’t exist for anyone else’s opinion, pleasure or approval.

If I could make that jump out of the screen and into your heart, I would.

It’s time to take our power back.

By choosing to reject that thinking and accept and celebrate your body for all that it is, you are taking a stand.

It is an act of body activism. Of beauty activism.

In a culture that wants us to buy all the products to try to look a certain way, choosing to love ourselves as we are is a radical act.

But howww?

People come to me all the time saying that they want to love their bodies, but they just don’t.

Often they are disgusted with what they see, so “love” feels just totally unrealistic.

And it makes so much sense: if you’ve spent years—sometimes decades—hating your body and trying to manipulate it into looking a certain way through diet, exercise, makeup, fashions, it can feel totally far-fetched to think that you will every look at yourself in the mirror in a bathing suit and not feel a pit of dread in your stomach.

Here are my suggestions to start down the path of shifting your views on your body. 

They admittedly look super simple, but that doesn’t mean they are easy. Don’t put a time frame on this, it may take you a long time to implement them!:

1.       Accept
2.      Connect
3.      Choose from love

Accept: You won’t just jump from hating your body to loving it overnight. So if love feels far-fetched, let’s make acceptance the goal. Acceptance is just appreciating what is. Finding things to be grateful for. And letting your body be neutral and not some emotionally charged thing that can make or break your whole day. It’s just a body. It’s just keeping you alive. It just is. Practice looking at your body, observing the judgments that come up and saying: “that’s ok. I accept it anyway. And here is something good that it does for me.”

Connect: Instead of avoiding looking at your body in mirrors or otherwise, set aside at least 5 minutes in your day to specifically breathe and connect with your body. This means looking at it, creating space and quiet to observe its sensations and cues. We can’t have a good relationship with our bodies, if we don’t have a relationship with our bodies at all. 

Choose from Love: Before you make decisions about what to eat, what exercise to partake in, how hard to push yourself, how late to stay up, what parties to go to, etc. take a pause. And ask yourself: If I deeply and completely loved myself, what choice would I make? Even if you don’t feel that deep and complete love yet, you can start choosing from that place. This is the practice of “acting as if” and it just might end up shifting you more into the body-love that you crave.

Do you want support in your body love journey? Book a free discovery chat to see if coaching could be right for you!