The Looming Pressure of Summer

It's everywhere.


"Lose 30lbs in two weeks"
"Get that bikini bod"
"Look beautiful this summer"


Blah, blah fucking blah. This pressure is on all of us. This is us being warped into thinking we need to look a certain way to be considered beautiful by society. This is endless adverts about losing weight fast with a promise of looking "amazing" afterwards.This is everyone around us talking about their diet. This is promoting disordered behaviour with food and exercise. This is depressing. This is oppressive. THIS IS DIET CULTURE (I will be doing a separate post on this in detail).


Every late winter/early spring we feel it is our duty to put our bodies (and mind) through hell in order to achieve the unattainable. Sure, people can lose weight and feel good about it, I am not trying to erase or belittle that, but what I am trying to do is make others aware of the day-in-day-out bullshit from multi-millionaire diet companies in the industry, feeding off everyone's money because they've grown up in a society surrounded by propaganda normalising disordered eating and promoting low self esteem and body shaming. We are living in a society that feeds off our insecurities just to make some dollar for the big guys up top. It's that embedded into us, that it feels normal and like what we should be doing.


But here I am, saying a big FUCK YOU to the diet industry putting this ridiculous pressure on us the same time each year. Come March we all start freaking out about if our bodies will be good enough to wear a bikini in the summer. Fad diets rise (which normalises yo-yo dieting and can make people feel even worse about themselves at some point). Gyms become inundated. The scales start to become the pinnacle of people's lives. We start having breakdowns because we "haven't lost enough" and therefore feel worthless, which just becomes a vicious cycle that is difficult to break out from. All of our friends and family talk about their diets and weight loss. It almost becomes an obsessional competition. "I only had this many SYNS at Slimming World" or "I've lost this amount of weight this week at WeightWatchers". Even questions like "how much weight have YOU lost this week?". As soon as Christmas has passed, this is all we can think about, and it takes over people's lives completely, becoming the utmost importance.


So do you agree, that it's everywhere we turn? Don't you agree that when seeing it all written down (or typed) like this that it's actually fucking ridiculous? 


WHY ARE WE WASTING OUR LIVES LIKE THIS?!

We could be LIVING.
We could be feeling LIBERATED.
We could find our STRENGTH.
We could be HAPPY in our own self.


Isn't it better to see someone SMILING?
Isn't it better to know someone is at PEACE with themselves?

We are all capable of doing many wonderful things beyond being occupied with our bodies.
Why not focus on your life goals instead?
Why cancel that meal with a friend because you're on a diet?
Why not LOVE yourself?


When you erase the bullshit in your life, you find that you are flourishing and being more mindful.
When you practice body positivity/acceptance, you become more loving towards yourself.
When you're more loving to yourself, you will become less worried about what people think, and maybe you'll wear that bikini no matter what, because you will have realised that your size does not define your worth as a person. You will have realised that you are a lot more than just your body and that you're strong and inspiring (not that you weren't already).


So why not put your energy into finding yourself and learning about yourself? Surely there's so much more to life if we do that?







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