There can be a lot of pressure to feel good about your body. To look in the mirror and like what you see. To feel comfortable in photographs. To appreciate your body. To eventually reach a place where the thoughts you have about it are mostly positive.
For some people, that can become another thing to work toward.
I know I shouldn't feel this way about my body.
I wish I could just accept it.
Why can't I feel more confident?
Instead of only struggling with how you feel about your body, you can start struggling with the fact that you still feel that way at all. It can seem like you should have reached a place of acceptance by now, or figured out how to feel more positively about what you see.
But a different relationship with your body doesn't necessarily require a different opinion about its appearance. You can have moments when you don't particularly like how your body looks. You can notice things you wish were different. Those experiences don't necessarily have to disappear for your relationship with your body to change.
What can change is how much those thoughts get to decide.
A thought about your appearance doesn't have to become an evaluation of who you are. A difficult moment in front of the mirror doesn't have to follow you through the rest of your day. Not liking something about your body doesn't have to become a problem that needs to be solved before you can move on.
Feeling better about your body may not mean eventually reaching a place where you always like what you see. It might mean that how you feel about your appearance has less influence over how you feel about yourself and what you allow yourself to do. There may still be things you like about your body and things you don't.
But perhaps the goal doesn't have to be loving what you see in order to live your life. Perhaps the goal can simply be to have more room in your life for everything else.
