It’s January, which means it’s peak diet advertisement time. My feeds are awash in ads entreating me to tone this, tighten that, blast the fat away, become a new (smaller) (better) me.

There’s an allure to it, isn’t there? The idea that if we were different, we would be better? If we got rid of our “problem areas”, all of our problems would melt away?

Don’t get me wrong. I won’t be signing up for what they’re trying to sell me. I’ve chosen not to participate in diet culture, because when I did, it damn near killed me.

But that message is out there, always: if you were different, you would be better.

In this culture, we are trained to dislike our bodies. And this is the truth: it’s hard to love your body when you don’t like it, and most of us dislike our bodies at least some of the time.

Maybe it’s your eyebrows. Too bushy, or too thin. Or your legs… too chunky, or too skinny. Maybe your body just DOES weird things, like gets unexplainable rashes. Or maybe it doesn’t do something you wish it did, like give you multiple orgasms or digest cheese effectively.

If we had to define our relationship statuses with our bodies, many of us would choose “It’s Complicated.”

Complicated, like: sometimes it’s good, and sometimes it’s bad.

Complicated, like: I respect and appreciate my body, but it isn’t the body I would have chosen. Like if it were possible to shop for a body in a store full of shapes & sizes, and I could pick one off a rack and say “This, I’d like to wear this for the next seventy-five years”?

This is not the body I would have chosen.

I can’t say I’m especially excited about this body. But I have this body, and it’s the only body I will ever have, and I might have it for seventy-five or eighty or ninety years if I’m really lucky. This body is it. It’s all I get.

Sometimes I do remember to appreciate it. I marvel at the miracle of this body. Its quiet functionality is truly astonishing, and it has a language and personality of its own: preferences, resistances, ticklish spots. Sometimes I find the chub of my belly cute or admire the strength in my arms.

Sometimes I look in the mirror and think “Not bad, not bad.” But mostly, this body is something I contend with on a day-to-day basis. My relationship with my body is the messiest relationship I’ve ever been in.

I’m sharing this because I know I’m not alone, but it’s not something we talk about. But let’s be real. Having a human body is weird and complicated, and most of us have been told that we’re doing it wrong since we were very little.

We’ve also been told that if we tried harder to change our bodies, our messy, confusing feelings might go away. 

What is true is that having complex feelings about our bodies makes sense. We didn’t pick them and managing them can be hard. Sometimes they’re not what we wish they were, or we spend time and effort and money shaping our bodies into the shape we consider ideal, only to realize we *still* aren’t happy, even after all that effort.

I have a theory about why our relationships with our bodies often feel so fraught.

It’s because having a body is a reminder that life, largely speaking, is out of our control. Things happen and we are dealt circumstances we did not plan for, and very little goes exactly as we might have hoped, and nowhere is this more true than in experiencing life in an unpredictable body.

This can be a difficult truth, and many of us spend our lives reckoning with this fact in a variety of ways, and one of those ways is enacting violence against the body, or making the body the site of our battle for control.

I want to affirm that a different path is here: it’s possible to handle this truth with love and compassion for ourselves and our bodies, to make peace between what we wished for and what we have, to forgive ourselves these complicated, confusing feelings, and to inhabit the world with a sense of thankfulness for our bodies and ourselves.

You can respect your body even if you don’t love the way it looks. You can take diligent care of a body you’re not crazy about. And you can love your body, even if you don’t like it. You only get the one, after all.

When I talk about loving your body, I’m not talking about the Instagram kind of love where ponytailed influencers bravely confess that they have gained five pounds but they will still share this softly-edited crop top photo with you.

I’m talking about that complicated kind of love, the messy love: the kind you feel for a parent you don’t get along with, or that tough-love friend who calls you on your bad behaviour, or the ex who was there when Shit Went Down and even though you’re not together anymore, you’ll always be connected. It’s kind of love that isn’t perfect or filtered or easy to caption, and it’s the kind of love that requires ongoing effort. It’s complicated love… a commitment to a tie that cannot be broken.

Sometimes that means going all-in on self-appreciation. Maybe you want to fight to see what’s beautiful about your body. Maybe you want to change how you talk and think about your body, Maybe you’ll stand in the mirror and look at it until it doesn’t look so bad anymore.

Or maybe the complicated love you have for your body is best served by creating a little distance: maybe what feels most practical to you is developing a functional arms-length relationship with your body. “It’s just a body, everyone has one, I’m trying to be less obsessed with mine.” (This approach is called Body Neutrality, by the way, and if the idea of “loving your body” in a warm and fuzzy way feels completely unrealistic or unappealing to you, I want to encourage you to check it out.)

There are endless ways to approach your relationship with your body.

As for my body: this body is not the body I would have picked, but it is the body I have, and I won’t punish it for existing. I will cultivate my relationship with it and I will learn its secrets and I will honor it. Because whether or not I chose it, my body and I are living this life together, and I would rather live with a friend than an enemy. 

PS: If you are struggling with your feelings about your body and don’t know where to start, I recommend a few books for people want to think about body acceptance in new ways on my Plus Travel Resources Page. Many of the resources on that page are for plus peeps, but the book recommendations will be useful to people of any size. I hope they help!