How I Stopped Comparing My Body

In the age of Instagram, filters, contour, and plastic surgery, loving your body is hard. Like many other women with social media, I started feeling like there were many things wrong with my body.

Over the years, we saw beauty standards change. Big bums, flat stomachs, and tiny waists were the new thing. The “slim thick” body.

I’ve always been skinny (in an unhealthy way). Eating was always a struggle for me growing up.

All my life I tried to gain weight. I would even eat all the unhealthy stuff people complained about “going right to the hips” because that's what I wanted. I wanted to have hips. I wanted to have curves.

When everyone started showing off their “slim thick” bodies on Instagram, I looked at them in awe. I would kill to have half as much as they did. “That’s what a real woman looks like”, I thought to myself.

And when I switched off Instagram, I would look at myself in the mirror and couldn’t help but compare my body to theirs.

It would destroy me. I felt like I wasn’t woman enough. I felt like I needed to work on my body. To change it. To look like them.

I felt ugly.

I started working out. Going on diets. Because I lived with my parents and wasn’t able to choose what I was eating, I started controlling the portions. I cut all the delicious food and desserts I enjoyed eating because I wanted to be “healthy”.

After a couple of months, I didn’t see any results. I gave up. And I felt even worse.

And then one day, when I was mindlessly scrolling through Instagram, I found a post that changed my life.

The description reads:

“And that is why you should never compare your body, your relationship or your career to a pic you see on Instagram. This is both me, this is both beautiful. But my body looks totally different in those two pics, just cause I changed the pose. So instead of trying to achieve a certain body type, try to have fun with all the different shapes and poses you can try with your incredibly unique and crazy awesome body.”

This blew my mind.

I then went on a search for these poses she was talking about and I found multiple videos on YouTube explaining how to look pose for pictures. I learned everything from lighting to angles and poses.

I was skeptical at first. It couldn’t be that simple. And it would definitely not work for me. (What a positive mindset I had!)

So I stood in front of my mirror and tried different poses. I was in shock. I started taking pictures, following all the tips I had learned in those videos. It was mind-blowing!

All this time I was thinking I was ugly when really I was just taking unflattering photos.

This made me think. If this is the magic key to embracing your own body, then why isn’t it more acknowledged?

And then saw this tik tok where Marcy Skinner poses in different ways to show that no one’s body is perfect all the time.

“It is normal, safe, and preferable that your body makes bulges and rolls as it moves around to allow you the best range of motion that you can have.”

Ultimately, what made me feel confident about my own body and stop comparing myself to other people, was knowing that I was comparing my raw, unposed self to a filtered, facetuned, photoshopped, or simply posed version of someone else.

Body positivity is not about feeling good about your body looking the way you want it to look. But embracing the fact that it doesn’t always look that way. And that’s ok.