What It's Like To Not Love Your Body

Trying to feel good about your body is, unfortunately, often a lifelong project in our culture. And that is poignantly evident in the Buzzfeed video "What It's Like Not to Love Your Body." Though honestly, I feel like the title of the video could just as easily be "Things Everyone Struggling to Love Their Body Can Relate To," because really the contents of the video seem less like a revealing glimpse of some strange alternate world and more like a reflection of daily life that plenty of people can identify with, at least from some stage in their lives. I know I can.

We live in a very strange culture where we barely even pay proper lip service to the idea that people deserve to feel good about their physical form, and instead promote the idea that it is completely OK for everyone's body to be judged anywhere at any time, and that everyone should fit into the same body type — this of course despite the fact that body diversity is not only totally natural and normal, but also healthy. There are seven billion humans on the planet. They were never meant to all have the same shape.

And so learning how to love your body is hard in a culture that seems specially constructed to make you do the opposite. But we aren't in this alone, either. Here are some of the things from the Buzzfeed video that people can struggle with:

Feeling Too Short

(Or too tall.)

Never Finding Clothes That Fit

Do designers not understand that people come in many sizes?

People Making You Feel Insecure

Other people's judgments suck.

Never Feeling Satisfied With Your Reflection

There always seems to be something to pick at.

The Dreaded Scale

Scales are awful.

But the video also shows what can happen if we try to share a positive attitude about this stuff to help people feel good about their bodies, too. Because the world doesn't have to suck.

Images: FreeStockPhotos; Buzzfeed Yellow/YouTube