Women have always had a difficult time accepting and loving their bodies, and that certainly doesn’t change during the holidays.
There is always so much food during Thanksgiving and Christmas and other winter holidays that it’s hard not to gain weight and then feel guilty and then vow to lose weight for a New Year’s Resolution. But is this guilt and shame and low self-esteem really necessary?
Sharon Fountain, the president of National Association for Self Esteem, explained how women can learn to accept themselves for the way they are, despite all the conflicting messages that surround them daily.
“A big piece of it is to realize that we are okay as is,” Fountain said. “If we decide we want to lose weight, we do that for very specific reasons. And maybe it’s for health, maybe it’s to help relieve the stress on our joints, maybe it’s because we just feel better, we have more energy and more strength when we’re thinner, but not because I need to be thin in order to be okay.”
Although the summertime might make women more obsessed with their appearances because of more skin exposure, the holidays can have a different effect – guilt over food and other things.
“If we know we shouldn’t do it because it’s not good for us but we do it anyway, it’s a rare person who accepts that and says ‘I’ll just start again after the holidays,’” Fountain said.
There is also a lot of holiday stress women have to deal with.
“Women I think still take the major burden for honoring the traditions that people have during the holidays,” Fountain said. “There’s an awful lot of caretaking of other people and a lot more being demanded of that woman to pull it off … and I think that increased stress during the holidays also contributes to poor eating choices.”
For women, self-esteem is commonly linked with body image, but changing appearance doesn’t necessarily improve self-esteem. Fountain mentioned an extreme makeover show, “The Swan,” as an example. Participants would undergo plastic surgery as part of the makeover.
“They realized very quickly that just because they improved the outside, doesn’t mean that they had worked sufficiently on the inside,” Fountain. “That’s where self-esteem comes into play. That’s the inside work.”
This doesn’t mean women can’t make changes, and some physical changes, like taking care of yourself better, can help boost self-esteem, but the inside is what matters most. Physical changes won’t completely take care of what’s inside.
“Those changes don’t make them intrinsically more valuable than they always were,” Fountain said.
According to NASE’s website, self-esteem is "the experience of being capable of meeting life's challenges and being worthy of happiness." According to Merriam-Webster’s online dictionary, it’s “a confidence and satisfaction in oneself” or “a reasonable or justifiable sense of one's worth or importance.”
One website, www.youngwomenshealth.org, defines self-esteem as relating to “how much you like yourself, and how you recognize or appreciate your individual character, qualities, skills, and accomplishments. Like body image, self-esteem can also be based on how you think other people look at you as a person.” Body image is “based on your thoughts and feelings about the way your body looks.”
Regardless of how you define self-esteem and body image, it’s clear that they can depend on each other for better or worse.
Fountain said she used to work with people who were mentally disabled and noticed how different their outlook on life was.
“They didn’t have the mental capacity to really get the distinction between themselves and other people,” Fountain said. “By and large, they had high self-esteem. They felt good about themselves because they didn’t know they weren’t supposed to. But the rest of us who get that distinction may feel sorry for them, but they’re not struggling with this … they’re just present in living their lives.”
Here are some suggestions Fountain gives for women to be able to diminish effects of bad body image:
1) “Be conscious of wearing clothes that fit well and that look good on [you] … just because you can fit into it doesn’t mean you should wear it. That means looking at it, making certain that you’re comfortable in your clothes, and that they reflect well on whatever the body shape and size is at that time.” This includes wearing timeless styles and clothes that drape well.
2) “Remind themselves that they are okay, they are not a reflection of their weight or their size … When we have a sense of ourselves, we can feel good about ourselves as a person, even if we’re not happy with the way our body looks at any given time.”
3) “Self-talk plays an important role in terms of how we feel about ourselves.” Women need to realize that they are capable and have worth.
4) When looking at magazines, realize that the way women appear in the pictures is not how they actually look – they’re Photoshopped.
5) Take care of yourself. This includes skin and hair, and not necessarily makeup. You can apply some makeup, but realize that you are fine without it.
There are multiple movements and organizations now to help women realize their true worth, and one website, www.ourbodiesourselves.org, has multiple tips to improve body image, including the following:
“Experiment with what weight feels comfortable to you, rather than trying primarily to be thin. Find your “set point,” a weight where your body feels comfortable and will fight to remain. Accept weight variations throughout the life cycle.”
One of my own suggestions is to look at all the ways you are excelling in life and try to think about those positive aspects of your life every day. Also, help others and be pleasant and friendly because that will only make you feel better and make a change in the world. When you feel yourself veering toward thoughts of how much weight you think you need to lose, realize that it’s a work in progress and focus on feeling comfortable at any weight.
Click through some of the following websites to explore more about self-esteem and body image. How do you define self-esteem and body image? Do you think they depend on each other? Do you ever feel one or both suffer during the holidays? How do you cope with that?
Sources:
http://www.ourbodiesourselves.org
http://www.womenshealth.gov/bodyimage/
http://www.media-awareness.ca/english/issues/stereotyping/women_and_girls/women_beauty.cfm
http://www.glamour.com/health-fitness/2009/03/women-tell-their-body-confidence-secrets
http://www.psychologytoday.com/blog/the-power-women/201001/the-truth-about-women-and-self-esteem
http://www.youngwomenshealth.org/self_esteem.html
http://www.self-esteem-nase.org/