Best 230 quotes in «body image quotes» category

Simply being born female in our society is to grow up being told your worth as a person is tied to how slim and attractive you are. Even for those of us lucky enough to have evolved parents, the message is still driven home by the world at large.

Since middle-class Western women can best be weakened psychologically now that we are stronger materially, the beauty myth, as it has resurfaced in the last generation, has had to draw on more technological sophistication and reactionary fervor than ever before. The modern arsenal of the myth is a dissemination of millions of images of the current ideal; although this barrage is generally seen as a collective sexual fantasy, there is in fact little that is sexual about it. It is summoned out of political fear on the part of male-dominated institutions threatened by women's freedom, and it exploits female guilt and apprehension about our own liberation -- latent fears that we might be going too far.

So get up, pretty woman! And from your beautifully shaped body don’t be ashamed For we are meant to be different, Rounded shapes and squared We come in a small, medium and a large size And to each there is still a wide range This is to create a beautiful portrait for the eyes And we are not supposed to please the “media-thinking” and change! So woman up! Whether your size is infinity-X large or infinity-X Small In love with “you” you should fall Don’t let them and their meaningless words or shallow looks Make you lose it all As to this nature you belong, The beach, the mountains, the oceans And the colorful life this mother earth has to give So embrace this with your body and soul No matter how they evolve… For as long as you live!

Somehow her getting naked breaks the tension. Her transformation is palpable: She seems easier, more confident; her body is how she asserts control.

Sometimes I look in the mirror and think I'm really good looking. Then other times I think my body's all wrong.

Sometimes I want to quit - not performing, but being a woman altogether. I want to throw my hands in the air after reading a mean Twitter comment and say, "All right, you got me. You figured me out. I'm not pretty. I'm not thin. I don't deserve love. I have no right to use my voice. I will start wearing a burka and move to a small town upstate and wait tables at a pancake house." So much has changed about me since I was that confident, happy girl in high school. In the years since then, I've experienced a lot of desperation and self-doubt, but in a way, I've come full circle. I know my worth. I embrace my power. I say if I'm beautiful. I say if I'm strong. You will not determine my story. I will. I'll speak and share and fuck and love, and I will never apologise for it. I am amazing for you, not because of you. I am not who I sleep with. I am not my weight. I am not my mother. I am myself. And I am all of you.

Sometimes the ugliest parts of ourselves are what others love the most.

So what if you have stretch marks. So what if you have cellulite. So what if you don’t have a big butt. So what if you don’t have large breasts. So what if you don’t have flawless skin. So what if you don’t have a body that other people deem to be perfect. So what! Don’t allow people to define YOUR beauty. Hold your head up high and know who YOU are! DO NOT EVER allow anybody to make you feel as if you’re NOT enough. You ARE enough! BELIEVE that.

Sometimes you need a reminder that negative comments about your body aren’t even really about your body, they’re about society and our society’s wrongheaded and impossibly narrow definition of a “good” body. Your body didn’t do anything wrong. What’s fucked up about your body is not your body at all, but that your body has to live in a society that thinks it has a right to say fucked up things about your body.

Staring at herself in the mirror, she found that she'd lost the ability to see herself through her own eyes. She was only what humans would see. Not a girl or a woman or someone in between. They wouldn't see her loneliness or fear or courage, let alone her humanity. They would see only obscenity. Calamity.

STAY POSITIVE (your body hears everything you think)

Step Away from the Mean Girls… …and say bye-bye to feeling bad about your looks. Are you ready to stop colluding with a culture that makes so many of us feel physically inadequate? Say goodbye to your inner critic, and take this pledge to be kinder to yourself and others. This is a call to arms. A call to be gentle, to be forgiving, to be generous with yourself. The next time you look into the mirror, try to let go of the story line that says you're too fat or too sallow, too ashy or too old, your eyes are too small or your nose too big; just look into the mirror and see your face. When the criticism drops away, what you will see then is just you, without judgment, and that is the first step toward transforming your experience of the world.

The articles were extremely eye-opening. Not just in Teen Vogue but in Seventeen and CosmoGirl as well. They were all about being yourself, staying natural, loving your body as is, and going green! The messages were the exact opposite of Vik and Viv's. Hmmmmm. Frankie turned to face the full-length mirror that was up against the yellow wardrobe. She opened her robe and examined her body. Fit, muscular, and exquisitely proportioned, she agreed with the magazines. So what if her skin was mint? Or her limbs were attached with seams? According to the magazines, which were - no offense! - way more in touch with the times than her parents were, she was suppose to love her body just the way it was. And she did! Therefor if the normies read magazines (which obviously they did, because they were in them), then they would love her, too. Natural was in. Besides she was Daddy's perfect little girl. And who didn't love perfect?

Stop thinking you’re doing it all wrong. Your path doesn’t look like anybody else’s because it can’t, it shouldn’t, and it won’t.

Telling yourself you like the way you look is easy. Believing it is an entirely different kettle of whales.

Stop making someone else's looks your "#goals". By all means aspire to be a better version of your current self, but don't glorify others when you yourself are glorious.

The best way to reach your destination is to just keep going until you get there.

... the cultivation of body dissatisfaction is so lucrative that the misguidance continues.

The flower of the ginger is superb and regal, but if we focus on nurturing the ginger plant to bloom we are unable to harvest its root. Enjoying the exquisite beauty of the plant will prevent us from unlocking its true potential—the nutrients secretly stored beyond the reach of the sun. Why care about trivial matters such as external beauty? What matters lies beneath the surface. What a waste! She is much more beautiful on the inside where she has so much more to give to the world.

The disconnect of men to women's bodies stands to reason. They'd have to care enough to see the other as a subject worthy of their earnest study. My own oblivion horrifies me more. I've been here all along but somehow not.

The human body is the most ordinary of things, yet also the most extraordinary.

The good news is that there is one kind of food you can never have too much of. The best way to fully recover from a food addiction or body-image problem is to fill up on the Lord.

The more I stare at my body, the more I hate it. It's the same feelings I had before I realized I'm nonbinary. Things just aren't where they're supposed to be, and I feel like I'm larger and smaller than myself at the same time. Like nothing adds up.

Their [girls] sexual energy, their evaluation of adolescent boys and other girls goes thwarted, deflected back upon the girls, unspoken, and their searching hungry gazed returned to their own bodies. The questions, Whom do I desire? Why? What will I do about it? are turned around: Would I desire myself? Why?...Why not? What can I do about it? The books and films they see survey from the young boy's point of view his first touch of a girl's thighs, his first glimpse of her breasts. The girls sit listening, absorbing, their familiar breasts estranged as if they were not part of their bodies, their thighs crossed self-consciously, learning how to leave their bodies and watch them from the outside. Since their bodies are seen from the point of view of strangeness and desire, it is no wonder that what should be familiar, felt to be whole, become estranged and divided into parts. What little girls learn is not the desire for the other, but the desire to be desired. Girls learn to watch their sex along with the boys; that takes up the space that should be devoted to finding out about what they are wanting, and reading and writing about it, seeking it and getting it. Sex is held hostage by beauty and its ransom terms are engraved in girls' minds early and deeply with instruments more beautiful that those which advertisers or pornographers know how to use: literature, poetry, painting, and film. This outside-in perspective on their own sexuality leads to the confusion that is at the heart of the myth. Women come to confuse sexual looking with being looked at sexually ("Clairol...it's the look you want"); many confuse sexually feeling with being sexually felt ("Gillete razors...the way a woman wants to feel"); many confuse desiring with being desirable. "My first sexual memory," a woman tells me, "was when I first shaved my legs, and when I ran my hand down the smooth skin I felt how it would feel to someone else's hand." Women say that when they lost weight they "feel sexier" but the nerve endings in the clitoris and nipples don't multiply with weight loss. Women tell me they're jealous of the men who get so much pleasure out of the female body that they imagine being inside the male body that is inside their own so that they can vicariously experience desire. Could it be then that women's famous slowness of arousal to men's, complex fantasy life, the lack of pleasure many experience in intercourse, is related to this cultural negation of sexual imagery that affirms the female point of view, the culture prohibition against seeing men's bodies as instruments of pleasure? Could it be related to the taboo against representing intercourse as an opportunity for a straight woman actively to pursue, grasp, savor, and consume the male body for her satisfaction, as much as she is pursued, grasped, savored, and consumed for his?

The patriarchal/kyriarchal/hegemonic culture seeks to regulate and control the body – especially women’s bodies, and especially black women’s bodies – because women, especially black women, are constructed as the Other, the site of resistance to the kyriarchy. Because our existence provokes fear of the Other, fear of wildness, fear of sexuality, fear of letting go – our bodies and our hair (traditionally hair is a source of magical power) must be controlled, groomed, reduced, covered, suppressed.

Then there was the realisation that I didn't actually feel that much better when I was thin(ner). In fact the 'thin' version felt worse because I lived with hunger clawing at my stomach all the time, and in fear that I was going to get fat again. After years of neuroticism I'd finally understood those who loved me would continue to put up with me fat or thin, and those who didn't ignored me. As a middle-aged woman I was pretty much invisible anyway. To pass unnoticed through an image-obsessed society is surprisingly liberating.

There are no corners to by body. I am round, round, round.

There is no dictionary in the world that includes the words ’skinny’ or ‘fat’ under the definitions of ‘beautiful’ and ‘ugly’. So, focus on being healthy and stop the self-criticism.

The reason we have such a difficult time losing weight permanently is not because we are making bad choices, but because we are not stopping our automatic subconscious programmed behaviors in their tracks.

The trouble is that so many people, most of them women, think they have to have a perfect body to be loved. But all it has to do is be capable of loving—and being loved.

There is something about my face in the mirrors that catch it. Even at a distance it will never be right again, not even to a casual glance. Beauty: it's the upkeep that costs, that's what Balzac said, not the initial investment.

The scale can only tell you what you weigh; not who you are.

The skinnier and more toned I got, the fatter I felt. The more in shape I got, the more out of shape I felt like I was. And the more I made myself look good to the masses, the less attractive I felt like I was.

There is something so marvelous about women comfortable in their own skin.

There's not a damned thing wrong with your body. You are average-sized, you deluded fool! You are an attractive, intelligent woman, you idiot! You should spend January lying in a hammock and eating cheese.

The strangest thing was, as beautiful as I found her to be, she admitted that she wasn’t always comfortable in her own skin. I found that hard to believe until she explained herself. All of the sudden I was not so much in awe of her but found myself empathizing with her.

This body needs me to say yes to it, just as it is right now. No more singing that same old jingle of body-shame and dieter's promised lands.

Those were the girls she’d been most jealous of, growing up—not just the thin, fashionable ones, but the types who surfed or rock climbed, who lived in such obvious peace with their bodies. Took joy in using their bodies. Mastered them. Merry’s had always felt like a bully. A great, heavy oaf pinning her to the ground, taunting.

This looks stunning (looking in mirror).

This was how I found out that there are an infinite number of things that can be “incorrect” on a woman’s body.

To cherish my purity and set boundaries are, in my opinion, the highest forms of feminism—a woman who saves her body proves she is strong and secure enough to resist the men who seek to claim her, that she’s more than what lies between her legs.

We are beautiful because we are sons and daughters of God, not because we look a certain way.

Truth be told, I’m still in awe of her, but I found it easier to relate to her. She really made me see that we are all the same. We all suffer the same feelings of inadequacy because we are not like others, but that’s what makes us so special too.

We can only bring about change in our lives when we clearly see two truths: that the pain of remaining the same is greater than the pain of fighting our toughest battles, and that by taking the biggest risks, we gain the most valuable rewards.

Weight loss is not the key to your dreams. The truth is there is no lock and the door is flimsy.

We clean our plates, yet we’re still famished—starving for something other than food.

We hated the gym. We loved it. We escaped to it. We avoided it. We had complicated relationships with our bodies, while at the same time insisting that we loved them unconditionally. We were sure we had better, more important things to do than worry about them, but the slender yoga bodies of moms in Lululemon at school pickup taunted us. Their figures hinted at wheatgrass shots, tennis clubs, and vagina steaming treatments. We found them aspirational. So we sweated on the elliptical and lifted ten-pound weights, inching closer to the bodies we told ourselves we were too evolved to want.

We do not have to spend money and go hungry and struggle and study to become sensual; we always were. We need not believe we must somehow earn good erotic care; we always deserved it. Femaleness and its sexuality are beautiful. Women have long secretly suspected as much. In that sexuality, women are physically beautiful already; superb; breathtaking. Many, many men see this way too. A man who wants to define himself as a real lover of women admires what shows of her past on a woman's face, before she ever saw him, and the adventures and stresses that her body has undergone, the scars of trauma, the changes of childbirth, her distinguishing characteristics, the light is her expression. The number of men who already see in this way is far greater than the arbiters of mass culture would lead us to believe, since the story they need to tell ends with the opposite moral.

Weight and body oppression is oppressive to everyone. When you live in a society that says that one kind of body is bad and and other is good, those with “good” bodies constantly fear that their bodies will go “bad”, and those with “bad” bodies are expected feel shame and do everything they can to have “good” bodies. In the process, we torture our bodies, and do everything from engage in disordered eating to invasive surgery to make ourselves okay. Nobody wins in this kind of struggle.

Weight (too much or too little) is a by-product. Weight is what happens when you use food to flatten your life. Even with aching joints, it's not about food. Even with arthritis, diabetes, high blood pressure. It's about your desire to flatten your life. It's about the fact that you've given up without saying so. It's about your belief that it's not possible to live any other way -- and you're using food to act that out without ever having to admit it. (p. 53)