Beauty Standards Suck

From an early age, women are bombarded with images of the “ideal” female body: lean, toned (but not too toned or else it’s considered unfeminine), flat and tight stomach, absolutely no cellulite anywhere, and perfectly proportioned butt and breasts.

Personally, I’ve never been able to meet the criteria for the “ideal” female body.

But this never stopped me from trying to meet those criteria for years on end. 

First—in middle school and high school—I tried to cover up my body as much as I possibly could with oversized sweatshirts and T-shirts (not the stylish oversized clothes we see today, either), sweatpants, puffy jackets, and hats. I did this because I was bullied in sixth grade into believing that I was overweight.

When I got to university, I felt even worse about my body.

I felt so bad, in fact, that I developed toxic workout rituals and an unhealthy relationship with food in order to try and finally meet those impossible beauty standards that had been ingrained into my mind since childhood.

Developing Toxic Workout Rituals and Problematic Eating Habits

When I made the transition from high school to university, any sliver of body confidence that I had left just crumbled away. 

I remember the day I met my roommates: there were three and we were in one of those apartment-esque dormitory living situations. We were all standing by the living room window, which looked out on another dormitory building. A group of people were lingering around one particular window on the bottom floor, and boys inside were handing out drinks through the window to girls outside. 

One of my roommates—she was tall and lean with shoulder-length platinum blonde and black hair and eyelashes for days—turned away from the window and said this: “Why were those other girls invited and not me? I’m way prettier than all of them.” She said it like she was joking but there was resentment and truth behind the comment, as well. I couldn’t help thinking that the girls who were getting tipsy outside the window were more attractive than me and—of course—the roommate who made the comment was more attractive than me, too. 

I didn’t stand a chance.

Uncoincidentally, I started frequenting the gym soon after. I would go every single day, sometimes twice a day if time permitted, for at least 90 minutes. I would do 60 minutes of high-intensity cardio (I would hop on an elliptical machine and crank up the difficulty to the highest setting) paired with 30 minutes of crunches, push-ups, bicycle kicks, anything that would help flatten and tighten my stomach.

For some individuals, going to the gym this much is completely normal and healthy, but it wasn’t about health for me.

It was about changing the way I looked.

I then combined my toxic workout rituals with problematic eating habits. I downloaded an app on my phone so I could track and manage my calorie intake each day and—no matter what, even if I did end up going to the gym twice in one day—I would only allow myself to eat 1200 calories per day. This means that there were likely days when I was only consuming around 700-800 calories overall.

The breaking point for me—and the point that I realized that I was not treating my body with any respect—was when I found myself shoveling food into my mouth, chewing it to get the taste, then spitting it out into the trash without swallowing it. Was I really prepared to work and starve myself to death in order to finally meet the criteria for that “ideal” female body?

No. I wasn’t.

After this, I eased out of those toxic workout rituals and started exercising and eating for my health. It wasn’t an overnight change and I continued to struggle with my body well into adulthood. It’s strange because, when I look at photos of myself from my first year of university, I wonder how I could have ever thought I was overweight. 

Body dysmorphia is a real thing.

Learning to Love My Body through Yoga

I was about twenty-four when I started practicing yoga. I had been practicing yoga occasionally before that point in time, but not seriously or thoughtfully: I was doing it primarily because I believed it would make me lean and toned. I mean, this is what my involvement with toxic workout rituals taught me—right?—that the only point of exercising was to lose weight as a means of meeting the female beauty standard. 

However, when I really started practicing yoga—not just the physical aspects but the mental aspects, as well—it became even clearer why my old toxic workout rituals were so harmful: they were purely physical and I wasn’t even exercising for myself. I was exercising to please others, complete strangers sometimes. 

What yoga did, and is continuing to do, was provide me with the mind-body connection that was absent during my first year of university when I was forcing myself to go to the gym. It changed the way I felt about my body and, ultimately, the way I saw and experienced myself. 

For instance, in the past, when I finished a strenuous workout, I would run home (or to my dorm room) and immediately hop on the scale to weigh myself, which would determine how much food I could eat that evening and still lose weight. It’s scary, I know. It makes me uncomfortable just writing about it. 

Now, however, before I begin a yoga practice, I always ensure that I eat enough beforehand so I can have a comfortable and productive practice both mentally and physically (also, there’s nothing more distracting than listening to a rumbling stomach during shavasana) and eat what I feel is necessary afterwards. 

If I sweat my ass off in yoga, I’m eating the whole damn kitchen afterwards if I feel like it.

In other words, I eat until I’m full now.

Staying Full

It is with this idea of “fullness” upon which I would like to end because it is exactly the right word to describe how the transformation from toxic workout rituals and problematic eating habits into the mind-body connection of yoga left me feeling: full.

Full of life. 

Full of appreciation for my body and mind. 

Full of understanding and forgiveness for the way I mistreated my body and mind in the past. 

Finally, it left me full of compassion for myself and others who may have had—or are currently having—difficult relationships with their bodies simply because of what society chooses to deem “beautiful.”