Body image: 10 ways to have a healthy love for yourself

Body image: 10 ways to have a healthy love for yourself

Don’t strive to look like celebrities. They have been airbrushed, primped, and plucked to perfection. Unless you have your own makeup team and can Photoshop the real you, it is a look you won’t achieve.

We all need a little boost now and then when it comes to feeling good about ourselves and about our body image. Here are 10 ways to help you boost that image.

1. Look into the mirror and let go of words like fat, ashy, pale and the like. Just look into your own eyes and see your face. You will see once the judgmental words disappear you are able to see yourself more clearly as the beautiful being that you are.

2. Life is too short; don’t beat yourself up over an occasional junk food binge. It is not worth killing your self-esteem with loathing for eating a plate of nachos for the first time in months.

3. Don’t judge yourself by society’s standards or other people’s standards. Love you for you, not for someone else’s acceptance. If you try and live for other people’s views of how you should be you will never be happy.

4. Starving yourself sucks. Remember that the next time you look in the mirror and contemplate it because you feel fat.

5. Love yourself just the way you are. Draw inspiration from different women who come in different shapes, sizes and skin tones and are beautiful and confident.

6. Don’t strive to look like celebrities. They have been airbrushed, primped, and plucked to perfection. Unless you have your own makeup team and can Photoshop the real you, it is a look you won’t achieve.

7. You are not your weight. How much you weigh shouldn’t define who you are.

8. Draw inspiration from the words of Oscar Wilde: “To love oneself is the beginning of a lifelong romance”.

9. Don’t base the confidence you have in your body on men. Have you ever heard of a man walking out of a bedroom when a woman strips down for him? Not likely…

10. Remember above all else, confidence is sexy.