This body houses you. It has grown with you. It sounds like an obvious statement, but so often we forget that it is the same body we came into this world with. Would we forgive it more if we remembered our newborn selves? Try to connect with the kindness you’d feel if it belonged to that baby or to someone else whom you love.
Run your hand over the parts that you find hardest to love. Breathe deeply, take your time and consciously release each negative thought that crosses your mind.
This is a powerful experience. If you can, try to commit to doing it a couple of times a week until the habit of praise for what you have overrides the habit of shame. One day this body will be gone. The time you have with it is precious. From now on, commit to treating it with kindness and care.
For a large part of my life I hated my body. Even when I was at my skinniest, which was really underweight, I thought I was fat. At the depths of my despair I used to self-harm as a form of punishment for being what I thought was ugly. Now I’m deeply happy to be me. I’m older (of course!) and heavier than I’ve ever been, but I wouldn’t be any other way. However, I still have to put in the right action on a daily basis – it only takes a missed meal or too many late nights and my mental state starts to slide and suddenly I’m looking in the mirror and checking my tummy to see how many inches I can pinch. Now, though, I know exactly how to get back on track. And I do. Fast.
JN
So many of my living years have been spent engaging in one form of self abuse or another. I’ve often wished and prayed that it wasn’t so easy to escape. Denegrating oneself is a form of abuse and a way to hide because, in doing so, we refuse to see and acknowledge the beautiful being we are just as we are. What if we could make a commitment to ourselves and to our daughters that we will stop abusing ourselves and our bodies in thought and in action? When we abuse ourselves we teach others that we are worthy of being treated badly. We show our daughters that we think we deserve to be abused and therefore they deserve it too – which is not true. Nobody deserves to be abused.
GA
Beauty really is an inside job
‘A mother who radiates self-love and self-acceptance actually vaccinates her daughter against low self-esteem.’
NAOMI WOLF
Taking care of your body will make the work ahead infinitely easier and more pleasurable. When you write your gratitude list each day find at least one thing you’re grateful to your body for. And as you go through your day, find ways to say thank you to your body through your actions. Notice how your relationship with it starts to shift as a result. You may also start to feel more confident in the process, because you know that you are doing right by yourself. Self-assurance will come more naturally and your relationships with others will change for the better. If we don’t care for our body, how can we expect anyone else to?
A woman who is truly comfortable in her own skin radiates an inner beauty regardless of whether she conforms to cultural norms of beauty. When someone is genuinely joyful and at ease with herself we gravitate towards her – and feel better about ourselves for being in her presence.
In my twenties I was quite consistently in the public eye. I remember doing one particular photoshoot for the cover of a magazine and being completely focused on, and distracted by, the fact that I felt fat. It wasn’t so much that things weren’t fitting, which has happened, too, on many occasions – in fact, one time I ended up wearing a tarpaulin over my shoulders because nothing else was working – but on this day I just felt unattractive in myself, and I remember turning inwards and being uncommunicative and allowing my negative thoughts to essentially ruin my (and maybe for all I know other peoples’) experience of that shoot. Now the pictures that were created that day expose not a hint of my inner turmoil – many over the years have been more revealing. Today, what I see when I look at those photographs is a very young, fresh-faced, beautiful young woman who had no sense or appreciation of how lucky she was in so many ways.
GA
Hormones
For many of us the onset of puberty marks the beginning of a monthly hormonal rollercoaster. Menstruation affects each of us differently, but mood swings, pain and changes in weight and libido can leave us feeling scattered and crazy each month. In fact, half of all women’s suicide attempts are made during the four days just prior to menstruation, or during the first four days of menstruation.5
A few pioneering companies have introduced a ‘period policy’, so that their employees can take sick leave if they need it, but most of us have learned to just ‘deal with it’. This may mean going to work when we’re in pain, rushing around doing chores rather than resting or feeling guilty for being bad-tempered. During your next cycle, consider listening to your body more carefully and responding to yourself with more compassion and kindness.
Pregnancy, miscarriage, oral contraception and fertility treatments can also create hormonal chaos in our lives and then, as we get older, there is another journey that we all end up taking as women and that’s the menopause.
The menopause
It’s astounding what a taboo topic the menopause – the cessation of periods – continues to be when it affects 50 per cent of the population. Women commonly experience the menopause between the ages of 48 and 55. Each woman’s experience will be unique, but common symptoms include hot flushes, night sweats, difficulty sleeping, reduced sex drive, memory and concentration problems, vaginal dryness and pain, itching or discomfort during sex, headaches, mood changes, palpitations, joint stiffness, reduced muscle mass and recurrent urinary tract infections. The symptoms often arrive several months or years before the menopause itself, during the perimenopause, and can continue to affect women for up to 12 years after their last bleed.
For me the perimenopause was a sudden inability to cope with anything when I had been seemingly able to cope with everything simultaneously for years without many hitches. It came in the form of sudden uncontrollable emotionality and hysteria and feeling like someone else’s brain had replaced mine. I honestly think I have been in gradual perimenopause since my thirties, and when I finally identified and acknowledged what was going on for me – or I guess when it finally got so bad that I needed to seek out a solution: bio-identical hormones – I could not remember when my brain had felt that ‘normal’. I started to realize how long I had been living with some of the symptoms.
When I began discussing it with my female friends I was amazed by two things. One, how many women had been through it, but it had never been a part of our conversation. I felt like we were whispering in covens, discussing the best witchdoctor to go to in order not to turn into a toad. And two, how many women had no idea it was coming or that some of their ‘symptoms’ might be related to it. If someone had told me sooner, if the subject had been less taboo and I had understood earlier what to expect and what lifestyle choices could make it worse, I might have saved myself years of emotional turmoil.
How great would it be if we as women didn’t feel embarrassed talking about the menopause and perimenopause? If we embraced this transition as one of the natural rites of passage of being a woman? How wonderful it would be if we were able to immediately identify the signs because we had been educated about them, know that we are not alone, and could seek early help?
GA
There are a range of natural remedies, dietary changes and hormone replacement therapies out there, but unless we know we need help we can’t access them. Too many women suffer either in ignorance or shame.
We should no longer feel obliged to just ‘deal with it’ or educate our daughters to do the same. If women started to speak about it more openly, we would embrace our hormonal experiences with curiosity and fearlessness as another example of what joins us together.
