What is Body Peace?
This is the first installment in the Body Peace Series. For more on Body Peace, click here or on the Body Peace Series tag below.
I’m excited to start this series not because I think I’m an expert in how to have the perfect relationship with your body, but because I have struggled a lot in the past with being kind to my body and being at peace with it.
Some of you may be wondering why I chose to call this the “body peace” series and not the “body love” series, since the phrase “body love” is definitely the obvious choice. I think it’s great that “body love” is being used more as women learn to love themselves, but I also think it’s a little unrealistic and doesn’t describe my journey very well.
In my experience, having the expectation that one day I’ll love my body so much that every single day I will be ecstatic about every single inch is a tall order. Also, for me, having body love as a goal felt like the opposite of body hate, making it just as extreme and just as obsessive as the mindset I wanted to get out of.
Through the years and years of body dysmorphia and obsession, all fueled with diets, wellness coaches, food scales, and bathroom scales. I became completely consumed by measuring every calorie consumed and burned, every workout, every hour of sleep. I thought if I could just fine-tune every single element of my health and wellness, if I could “hack” the unique puzzle of every single one, I would accomplish my goals and finally love myself. But I didn’t find self-love -- I found a crippling disorder that led me to some very unhealthy habits I was convinced would lead me to ideal health.
Because of this, when I started to recover in 2018 I realized that I didn’t want to be obsessed with my body anymore, not even if that meant I was obsessed in a “good” way. No, what I’ve always truly wanted is to be able to not obsess at all, but to just be.
What I have realized throughout my journey so far is that being unconditionally at peace with myself is more important than being in love with my body. Not placing so much worth on what my body looks or the good things it brings but rather being content to accept whatever the human experience has to offer as a result of me living in my body is far more important to me.
I focus more on what it feels like to have a body. I know this may sound really different from the narratives we see on Instagram when body acceptance comes up, but stick with me.
Instead of looking in the mirror and forcing myself to say “I love my cellulite” over and over and over again until I believe it, to build this sense of body peace I focus more on how I feel. I don’t mean do I feel bloated or hungry, what I mean is how does it feel to touch things? How does it feel to inhale or exhale? How does it feel to tense my muscles? How does it feel to release them?
How does it feel to smile?
What’s the sensation of eating my favorite food? Of drinking my favorite tea?
What does it feel like to laugh? What does it feel like to have a good, long cry?
These are all the things that having a body - a body that looks however it does - afford me in life. Without my body exactly as it is in this moment, I wouldn’t feel the relief of a long exhale, the joy of a giggle, or even the texture of my bed sheets. These are all relatively neutral experiences that have absolutely nothing to do with how my body looks but have everything to do with my body existing just as it is.
To me, that’s the difference between body love and body peace.
I don’t have to love my body because it allows me to laugh or to breathe or, in my privileged case, to move and exercise. Loving in that way is conditional, meaning that it can come and go depending on how we feel about what we’re experiencing. Body peace, on the other hand, is the contentment that comes with accepting that our bodies are neutral and can bring us both good and bad experiences (or, rather, pleasurable and painful experiences).
Ultimately, body peace allows us to stay neutral about our bodies and avoid any type of obsession about it. It also allows us to build a more unconditional connection to our bodies - one that doesn’t leave or change when we experience something less than ideal.
That’s the goal of this series: to share how we can let go of any expectations for our bodies and just let them be. In short, to build body peace, unconditionally.
How do you feel about the phrases “body love” and “body peace”? In your experience, is there a difference? Let’s open up the conversation in the comments!