How To Not Hate Your Body This Summer

11 ways to stop treating your body like a problem to solve.

Sisters by Adam Shultz, Vogel Scwartz Sculpture Garden, Little Rock, Arkansas. Photo by me.

Note #1: This essay is primarily speaking to women who were brainwashed by culture and media to believe that gorgeous, healthy, well-functioning bodies are fat and disgusting, and only tiny, emaciated bodies are beautiful, lovable, and desirable. That being said, unreasonable beauty standards and body image issues plague men, trans, and nonbinary people as well, so for the sake of this read, if you are in those groups, please assume that you are being included, even if I don’t provide a lot of examples and references that aren’t women.

Note #2: I’m really not talking to people who feel strongly that their weight is tied to major health issues and that losing weight will help those issues. Your body is your body. I’m not judging you for losing weight or wanting to lose weight, and I obviously can’t know everyone’s situation. I’m speaking here to the people like me, who have bodies that are perfectly fine but who have been told they’re not because they aren’t super-super skinny. OKAY ENOUGH WITH THE DISCLAIMERS.

Well, pinecones, we made it to another summer! The days are as long as they’ll ever be, the temperatures are making the whole idea of clothing feel questionable, and all the commercials are telling us we need to work harder to get our “bikini bodies” back before we are forced to waddle into autumn ashamed of our still-pudgy butts and tums.

I was born in 1983. My childhood memories are heavy with Disney-branded jazzercise videos — which I obediently completed on a daily basis, because my mom said that’s what would make me thin and therefore pretty. Being pretty was extremely important. Being pretty opens doors.

Mousercise! It was called Mousercise. The instructor was the most gorgeous woman I’d ever seen. I did the videos religiously because I wanted to be just like her.

She was very thin. Very blonde. Very good at exercise. Nothing like me.

Original marketing material for Disney’s Mousercise, found on Reddit (thanks user RedKittieKat).

I was a chatty, spunky kid that everyone around me saw as unforgivably fat. I’m being serious. It’s hard to believe now how much shit I caught for looking like this:

Omg my poor sister whose idea was this?!? Photo credit: probably my dad.

First diet at age 10. Finally found one that worked at age 16. I’d lose weight and gain it back. I’ve been yo-yo dieting my entire adult life.

That is apparently not very good for you.

The last time I dieted to lose weight was last fall. I lost 15 pounds from August to December. I gained them all back by February.

I’m really good at losing weight when properly motivated. Every five years or so I manage to lose 20–30 pounds, and without fail, women ask me how I did it. When I tell them, they don’t like it. It involves a lot of monitoring, tracking, and math. It’s a full-time project. You can never stop, because if you stop, you gain the weight back.

That’s how bodies work.

Working out a lot isn’t enough for me to be thin. I can go to the gym six days a week and walk two hours a day, and my weight will not budge more than a few pounds. Never the 10, 20, 30, or 40 pounds I’ve always believed I needed to lose.

The only thing that gets my body to shrink is restricting my calories and being hungry all the time. In order to eat a little more, I’d also work out a lot. All of this is challenged by terrible insomnia, because my body starts screaming that it doesn’t have enough food to repair from all the working out I’m doing and keeps me up all night.

Y’all. I’m just gonna say it. Being thin isn’t worth all this.

Being thin isn’t worth injecting yourself with drugs that make you poop weird and take away your enjoyment of food.

Being thin isn’t worth having your stomach literally stapled down so that normal amounts of food will make you vomit.

I’m gonna go ahead and say something else, too, and this one is real controversial.

The benefits of being thin are wildly overstated.

Being thin doesn’t make you sexier nor does it make you enjoy sex more. I’ve had great and terrible sex at all of the sizes I’ve been. I’ve been to play parties where the ratio of fat to thin people was pretty even and the fat people were getting it on like champions, zero wallflowers in sight. People who equate thinness with sexiness are struggling with their own body image issues and projecting them onto others.

Being thin doesn’t make you more capable of career success. There are plenty of fat people in the upper echelons of literally every field. Yeah, I’ve seen the reports of studies showing that fat people are more likely to be discriminated against at work or judged to be lazy and less competent, which is absolutely vile, but when I look around the world, I see lots of fat people absolutely owning their careers across industries.

(Also, personal anecdote: Losing weight lost me my closest shot at Broadway. Yup. I was on the future hire list for Mamma Mia! when I was fat, and two years later, when a spot opened up for me, I had lost a bunch of weight. I no longer fit what they wanted and was taken off the list. I lost weight to have more career success and the opposite fucking happened.)

Being thin doesn’t make you more lovable. My anchor partner has loved me through multiple incarnations of my body size and shape, and when I look around the world, I see plenty of fat people in happy relationships. Plenty of fat people getting married, dating around, taking lovers, exploring nonmonogamy, all the things.

I’m not saying it’s just as easy for fat people to have all these things as it is for thin people. I do think it’s harder, but not because fat people are inherently less lovable, sexy, or competent. I think it can be harder for fat people to believe they are lovable, sexy, and competent, because of how the world bullies them.

I have a theory that all the studies showing you’re less likely to have good outcomes in life as a fat person would fall apart if we accounted for how much fatphobic bullying each person in the study has endured versus how much loving support and encouragement they’ve gotten from their families and communities. My guess is the people who’ve been bullied less would tend to have better outcomes than those who’ve been bullied more. It’s hard to blossom into your full potential when you’ve spent your whole life being told your body is evidence that you’re a failure.

So if being thin is a constant job that demands restriction and hunger and doesn’t actually give me any real benefits…why have I been working so hard for so long for it?

Maybe a “bikini body” is just a body in a bikini.

(Maybe — MAYBE — bikinis themselves are over-fucking-rated! I mean, SHIT. They don’t stay on. Raise your hand if you’ve ever been enjoying a beach day and then had a strong wave tear your bikini top right off your body. In case it’s not clear, I’M RAISING ALL MY HANDS.)

Here’s a photo old me would never have posted online because I would’ve believed I look unforgivably fat in it. Photo credit: my delicious partner Daniel.

That all being said, here are 11 ways to stop hating your body this summer.

1. Look around the world.

If you do, you will see fat people unapologetically flaunting their bodies everywhere these days. Thicc girlies in crop tops and miniskirts, beefy boys in shorts and tanks, baddies with stomach rolls and thunder thighs rocking skintight two-piece sets at the gym. Fat people exhibiting zero body shame are literally everywhere. We may have slid into the Ozempic era as far as pop culture and media go, but in the real world, the body positivity movement has had a visible and lasting effect.

I heal a little more every time I see a chubby lady looking confident and fully embodied in a cute little outfit.

2. Look at all the fat people winning at life.

Stacey Abrams. Aidy Bryant. Lena Dunham. Roxane Gay. James Corden. Wunmi Mosaku. Lindy West. Kevin James. Danielle Brooks. Oprah Fucking Winfrey. Meg Stalter. Bridget Everett. Sam Smith. Lizzo. Adele. My friend Lillian Bustle. Not to mention all the successful fat folks you never would’ve heard of because they aren’t famous, but again, just look around.

Sorry, haters, but the world is full of successful fat people doing incredible work. If my theory that fat people are held back more by bullying and fat-shaming than by anything inherent about being fat, then looking to all the fat people who’ve pushed through that shit to their dream lives can help us all realize…I can, too. I CAN, TOO!

3. Fix your algorithms. This is a big one.

Go to Instagram (assuming you use Instagram) and follow all of these accounts right now:

Sarah Nicole Landry

Danae Mercer

Alex Light

Jameela Jamil

Aubrey Gordon

Arielle Juliette (Madison Dance Life)

Sarah Puhto

Megan Jayne Crabbe

Alicia Mccarvell

Jess King

Then follow whoever the algorithm suggests that aligns with these accounts. Repeat on all your other platforms.

Just as important: Unfollow accounts that regularly trigger thoughts of not being thin enough. I love Natasha Lyonne and Mindy Kaling, but I unfollowed both of them when they suddenly got tiny. 💔😭

The reason I think this is a huge one is that our literal vision has been corrupted by the way media and culture only celebrate tiny bodies, particularly for women. We are accustomed to seeing emaciated bodies and thinking it’s the height of beauty.

We are also accustomed to the media claiming women like these were fat:

Photo credit: the Internet meme factory.

In actual real life, these women are all aspirationally beautiful, desirable, sexy, the works.

But all of us millennial women saw them getting trashed for fatness. Then we looked at ourselves and thought, “If she’s fat, I’m a fucking whale.”

And now, when we look at bodies, our eyes are trained to see the bodies above as in need of “improvement” and our own as “beyond hope.”

THIS. IS. BULLSHIT.

We need to retrain our vision. Get the skinny influencers out of your feeds. Follow women who show you the truth instead.

Over time, you’ll start to notice your own vision shifting, softening, yearning toward healthy, strong, real bodies. You’ll no longer look at a super-skinny actress and think she’s the ideal. You’ll know a waif when you see one, and you won’t think that’s a good thing.

You just gotta stop drinking the skinny Kool-Aid.

4. Get a dog.

This doesn’t seem like love-your-body advice, but I’m telling you that when a sweet little fur-baby loves you exactly the way you are, it changes something in you. Dogs are especially good for this, because on top of the unconditional love, they also force you to get outside in nature on a regular basis, which is great for your mental and physical well-being. You start to appreciate what your body can do over how it appears.

Your dog doesn’t give a shit if you can fit into your skinny jeans today. She thinks you’re perfect no matter what.

5. Wear clothes that feel good on your body. It’s okay — nay, encouraged to size up.

Are you (like me) burdened by a closet half full of clothes you’re waiting to be thin enough to wear again? Are you afraid to buy a larger size because of WHAT IT MEANS ABOUT YOU? Hmm? Hmm?

I get that it’s hard to let go, but let that shit go. Get those clothes out of your house! Replace them with clothes that actually feel good to wear. And remember: SIZES ARE MADE UP. They do not matter and they’re not real.

I used to wear a lot of clothes that were designed to look good but not feel good. Think tight jeans, corset tops, body-con dresses covered in sequins, all sorts of cinching and pinching to get the shape of my body to resemble the number 8, and guess what, pinecones? That shit was not comfortable. I have literal scars from garments I’ve worn to try and look snatched. Fuck shape-wear, for real. And don’t get me started on the insanity of high heels.

During the pandemic, I decided to only wear clothes that felt truly good and comfortable on my body. I bought oodles of velvet jogger pants and stretchy tops in fun prints. I replaced pencil skirts and corset tops with flowy maxi dresses and sassy cropped tees. The goal: Look like I tried but feel like I’m in PJs.

I no longer remove my garments at the end of the day and see a web of nasty red imprints on my skin from the places they were squeezing and contorting my shape.

It’s heaven.

And wouldn’t you know…that feeling of “fatness” that used to plague me even when I was thin? It shows up a lot less when my clothes aren’t so tight.

6. Trust what your loved ones say about your looks over what you think.

This is so huge. Listen, we do not see ourselves clearly, okay? You do not, I do not, we do not. We look at ourselves and judge things that no one else even notices. What we see isn’t reality. We are not objective observers of ourselves.

Our friends and lovers see us much more clearly than we see ourselves, so I propose that we trust their opinions over our own in this particular arena.

I might wake up and look in the mirror and think, “My Goddess, who let the crazy lady out of the barn?” while my partner looks at me and thinks, “Samia is looking mighty fuckable this morning!”

He’s right. I’m wrong. End of debate.

7. Do sensual things that feel good to your body.

Exploit all five of your miraculous senses (or however many you have if you don’t have the full use of all five) to their fullest effect. Live your life sensually.

I’m talking luxurious showers where you bust out the decadent exfoliating scrub that you bought at the farmer’s market and then never used. I’m talking baths with aromatic oils and flower petals. I’m talking trading massages or scritch-scratches with whoever is nearby and willing. Anything that feels good to one or more of your senses will help you stay in your body, rather than outside of it, judging it.

Here are some other ideas, but feel free to get creative with your bad sensual self:

• Self-stimulation of any kind, like tickling your own arm or neck.
• Masturbation. Uplevel by using fun toys! I’ve really been loving this one and this one.
• Spring for the extra soft sheets and pillows.
• Wrap yourself in an ultra-plush blanket.
• Find a hot tub. Sit in it. Maybe read a book and drink a delicious cold beverage at the same time.
• Eat truly delicious food. Savor each bite.
• Listen to music that makes you feel things and see if it creates changes in your body.
• Go to one of those shops that sells aromatherapy tools, find a scent that lights you up, and fill your home with it.

There are infinite ways to give your body sensory pleasure. Find as many as you can. It’s harder to hate your body when it’s capable of making you feel so good.

8. Engage in some light CBT.

Or Cognitive Behavioral Therapy, which involves bringing attention to your automatic thoughts and reactions and consciously changing or replacing them. This one is sort of an ongoing practice that’ll feel really dumb and forced at first, but over time, it can change the way you think. For real.

Basically, any time you have a shitty thought about your body, you replace it with a healthier thought. For example, let’s say you catch yourself in the mirror and immediately think, “What a cow.” Stop. Ask yourself if you’d ever say something like that about a close friend. No? What would you say to them? Great — say that to yourself instead.

Rinse and repeat.

9. Move your body in ways that feel joyful.

Notice I said joyful, not purposeful. Purposeful is fine, too, if it’s also joyful, but the kind of movement I’m talking about here is movement that actually feels fun and delightful to you. It could be a sport or some form of dance or even just lovely walks in pretty places — all of that is great. If you absolutely love the feeling of lifting weights, like I do, that’s fine, even though it’s also purposeful.

The joy is the point. Movement that feels fun.

Exercise has gotten wrapped up in our cultural obsession with weight loss, and that has created a resistance to movement for a lot of people. I know, because I used to be one. I hated anything that resembled exercise when I was younger, mostly because exercise represented everything that was wrong with me. It was a reminder of all the bullying I’d endured.

Moving around is actually fun and joyful, but when it becomes something you have to do because you’ve been convinced your body is wrong and needs to be smaller, it can easily become something you dread.

Fight back on this by reclaiming movement for yourself. Find ways to move that you personally think are fun, and put zero thought into how many calories it might burn.

It’s not about the calories. It’s about the joy.

10. Give yourself amazing sexual experiences.

When you start exploring the deep wellsprings of pleasure that your body is capable of, it’s really hard to maintain an active hatred of it. Sexual pleasure is a game-changer, whether it’s with yourself or with others.

If you’re in a relationship, hopefully you’re already having great sex. But if not, do everything you can RIGHT NOW to change that. It’s important for your mental health. I’m being so serious right now.

For women in relationships with men who aren’t pulling their weight in the bedroom, give him this video course for his next birthday. It will change both your lives. (That link gets you a 15% discount and earns me a commission, so you’ll be supporting my work and improving your sex life, huzzah, huzzah!)

For anyone in a relationship who feels like things have gotten stale, the courses at Beducated are amazing for learning new skills and brushing up on the fundamentals, meow meow. I’m currently working through a course on how to give an excellent prostate massage! 🥰

And if you’re not in a relationship, you don’t have to wait for one to show up to have amazing sex. There are so many people looking for casual but caring intimate encounters. Get on some apps, get clear about what you want — mutually pleasurable sexual experiences carried out with respect and care — and get you some, honey.

11. If you still want to change your body, focus on making it more functional and strong.

The most effective and holistic game changer for me and my relationship with my body was getting strong and fit. Yes, the motivation to do so started out as a desperate need to get thinner. Yes, the first time I completed a 12-week lifting program, I thought I had failed because I’d only lost a measly five pounds (never mind that I had built muscle tone and structure I’d never had before, it was all about the number on the scale back then). Yes, I spent years dragging myself to gyms I didn’t really want to be in before it became enjoyable.

But eventually, I got good at it, I got strong, and I started to love the feeling of using my precious body to move really heavy weights around.

Starting anything new is hard because you’re going to suck at it and that doesn’t feel good. But when the thing you’re starting is a plan to make your body stronger and fitter, getting good at it becomes the reward.

It’s life-affirming to lift a weight that felt hard a few weeks ago and feels easy now.

You get a massive self-esteem boost when you realize you just did 20 push-ups in a row, and when you started, you could barely do one.

You discover that being strong and fit has nothing to do with being thin. Being thin actually makes fitness hard, because you can’t build new muscle when your body is in a calorie deficit. You have to eat more than you burn to get stronger. That’s blasphemy for someone trained from birth to be a good little dieting queen.

Getting strong has changed my relationship with my body in fundamental ways. I have no problem lugging heavy suitcases. I help men open jars. I can carry a 70-pound pitbull over my shoulders if he gives up in the last half mile of a hike.

Strength training didn’t heal me all on its own, but throughout my journey with self-acceptance and -love, building my physical strength has been enormously helpful. It allows me to feel better and more capable in my body, and it regularly gets me compliments that have nothing to do with my size. “Your arms look amazing!” “Oh no, this is really heavy — whooooooa how did you just lift that so easy?” “Oh my god, have you felt how hard your calves are? GIRL.”

These compliments feel so much better than the ones about my weight or size, because they’re about what I can do. I worked hard for that strength and I’m proud of it, and it’s there whether or not my body is thin.

I’m going to be real with you. None of these things will actually get you to love your body, okay? Loving your body is hard. It might be too hard. It might be something you feel sometimes but not others. That’s totally fine. We’re not aiming for love here. We’re aiming for not-hate.

And maybe, if we can come around to not hating our bodies, we can find our way to a gentle appreciation. Maybe that can lead to a steady positive regard.

And maybe, if we are lucky enough to grow old and wise, that can lead to love.

If you are reading this, you are worthy of love. Unconditional love. Not just from others, but from yourself.

If that doesn’t feel attainable, I get it.

Just focus on having a good time while you’re here. See what that does.

Do you have methods, ideas, and techniques that work for you when you’re having moments of body-hate? Share them in the comments. We’re all better when we put our great ideas together, pinecones.