At one time or another, it has been every woman’s enemy: a dressing room mirror.
Whether you’re curvy or straight up and down, finding a flattering fit can be frustrating. Maybe you think your legs are too bony for skirts or your butt is too big in those jeans. It’s always something.
And no matter how much you weigh, when it comes to swimwear, most of us wonder if that suit makes us look . . . fat.
Sadly, it even crosses the minds of the skinniest supermodels.
But all that negative talk has to go, say the organizers of Fat Talk Free Week, a national campaign to eliminate language harmful to body image. According to the National Eating Disorders Association, as many as 10 million women are fighting a life-or-death battle with some type of eating disorder. And a lot of it has to do with body image.
We look at Rihanna and Taylor Swift and all the Hollywood beauties, often thin and seemingly flawless, and we think that’s the standard. We set the bar set so high that it’s hard to be happy with what you have.
Yet that’s what we have to do. It’s a time to look at yourself in the mirror and think only about all the good things you see.
The campaign stems from a program (bodyimageprogram ) created by Carolyn Becker, an associate professor of psychology at Trinity University in San Antonio, in collaboration with campus sororities as well as national women’s fraternity Tri Delta.
Campuses all over the country join in the ban every year in hopes of increasing self-esteem and rejecting unrealistic standards of beauty.
Beth Guinta, a student at the University of Missouri-Kansas City, had never heard of the movement. She’s also a designer, and her style is to exaggerate the parts of the body that women are most insecure about to help them embrace their body with a positive outlook.
Still, she thinks it’s going to take more than an attitude shift. It’s important to push fitness too, she says.
“It is incredibly damaging to engage in that kind of speech,” she says of fat talk.
“For some reason it’s an easy way for women to relate to each other. Which is funny, because thin isn’t my ideal beauty. But I don’t think banning that kind of talk really promotes health.”
Erin Brown, a 28-year-old personal trainer, says she can see where this campaign would have its critics, but it has her support.
“I’m for anything that aspires to teach women to love themselves as they are today and focus more on what feels good and not what looks good. When you are healthy you feel good — and healthy always looks good.” Brown has struggled with body image most of her life. Only recently has she learned to be comfortable and healthy in her skin.
Now she helps others do the same through her work and her blog, .
“We are too focused on an unattainable ideal,” she says. “Our bodies are different. They were given to us by our mothers, and we should love and respect them.”
