How To Accept Your Body

2024 Author: Harry Day | [email protected]. Last modified: 2023-12-17 15:43

Eating disorders rank first among mental disorders in terms of the number of deaths. The highest mortality rate is in patients with anorexia. In Western Europe, the prevalence of anorexia nervosa among women is 0.9-4.3%, among men - 0.2-0.3% *.

Not the least role in the development of anorexia is played by a society in which diets and exercise are idealized for the purpose of losing weight. Mass media actively promote slimming: advertising of food products for harmony; shows in which participants lose weight; modeling business, beauty bloggers, etc. Slimness is perceived by many as the key to success. If some celebrity has lost weight, then even news channels must write about this, if she recovered, too, but already in the context of “how she launched herself”. If at a psychological forum someone raises the question "how can I accept myself with my fullness?" (most often this is written by a girl who is in the most normal weight for her height and physique), then under the post there will be hundreds of aggressive comments that “you should not accept yourself as fat, but go on a diet and exercise” and a million tips on how to lose weight … While such hurtful "advice" is being written, in hospitals around the world there is a struggle for the lives of adolescents who have brought themselves to exhaustion. 5-6% of patients die from anorexia, some more later have health problems.

One very young girl (for obvious reasons, I will not give her name) told me how she brought herself to a terrible state and how she coped with all this. Perhaps this method will help someone else. Maybe for mothers whose daughters exhaust themselves with diets.

The girl trained all the time and was afraid to eat something from which she could get better. She felt bad: chronic weakness, dizziness, nerves at the limit, the body did not have enough strength even for “women's days”. She understood that she needed to eat, but she was afraid that if she ate even a piece, she would get fat, and did not eat. Then she could not restrain herself, ate something sweet and reproached herself for it. She secretly threw away the food prepared by her mother. If she could not do it, she intensified her training … and continued to consider herself fat. It was already hard for her to get out of bed, there was no strength for anything. She realized that something terrible was happening to her and she needed to save herself. The girl found the phones of psychologists, but she never called anyone - she was afraid.

She independently found a way to get rid of the fear of getting better. The girl found photos of lush beauties on the Internet. Looking at Plus-Size models helped her embrace the fact that a curvy body can be beautiful. Then she came to the conclusion that the most important thing in beauty is the confidence that those girls who are considered the first beauties in school actually have an ordinary appearance, but are confident in their beauty.

The second thing she did was start cooking. She looked for new recipes, tried combinations of different ingredients, experimented, and began with great pleasure not only to cook, but also to eat.

The girl still goes in for sports and adheres to proper nutrition. But there is no fanaticism in all this: she eats whatever she wants, does not reproach herself for a day or even a week without training. She likes what the mirror shows and is not worried about how well the reflection in the mirror matches someone's beauty standards.

I think the most important thing that this girl did is that she recognized the problem in time, the need to solve it, and began to act. Alas, people with anorexia (and others) often deny the problem until it becomes serious. The story told by the girl is a light case when she managed to do it on her own, without a hospital.

There are two poles of dislike for the body - on one, a person does not follow nutrition and is far from sports, on the other, he exhausts himself with diets and training. And love is in the middle. Love yourself!

* Smink, FR; van Hoeken, D; Hoek, HW (August 2012). "Epidemiology of eating disorders: incidence, prevalence and mortality rates." Current psychiatry reports. 14 (4): 406-14. PMC 3409365. … doi: 10.1007 / s11920-012-0282-y.