Translator: David DeRuwe
I have a question for you:
Do you love your body?
The majority of the people who I ask say:
“I don’t like it” or “I hate my body.”
So let me ask you a new question:
“Do you remember when you started to hate or to not like your body?”
Well, I don’t know when I started to hate mine,
but I remember exactly when I started to love it -
in 2020, when I was 36 years old.
I was a skinny child,
and I went through childhood without any worries about my body.
When I was 11, my parents separated.
and my life and the lives of my sisters were turned upside down.
I gained 20 kilograms,
cut my hair very short,
had lots of pimples on my face,
and I had no vanity.
On a trip with my father, at a lunch stop,
a friend of his confused me for a boy.
I don’t know who was more embarrassed - me, my father, or the friend.
I don’t know exactly when, but at some moment of adolescence,
I began to look at my own body with hate and at food as an enemy.
I suffered repeated episodes of bullying and fat-phobia.
I was nicknamed “Pillow,” many times I was called “fat,”
and at 15, they asked me if I was pregnant.
Many people suffer aesthetic pressure at home.
Fathers and mothers who criticize
the weight and eating habits of their children
are doing evil, thinking they’re doing good.
I didn’t suffer this in my home, but I’m the daughter of a beauty queen,
a beautiful and timeless beauty queen who always worried about her appearance
with diets, surgeries, and aesthetic procedures.
I never heard criticism from my mother in regards to my appearance or my body.
She was, however, my role model for my obsession with thinness,
in addition to the pressure I suffered from the outside world.
I don’t remember how or when I discovered bulimia -
this was before the internet -
but unfortunately, I discovered it.
This became my escape and my darkness.
There was relief at getting rid of what I had eaten
and at the same time, there was shame and despair
at thinking I had no control over myself.
There were days where my diet consisted of five apples,
or on other days, a package of cream cracker cookies.
Other days were marked by compulsion, followed by self-provoked vomiting.
I took the rice off the plate, then the beans and the meat,
and I started taking vitamins
to get the nutrients I wasn’t getting in my diet.
I exercised too much, often in jeans
because I thought that this would help me lose weight faster.
I lost weight,
then fattened up again after my first depression.
And this accordion effect on my weight went on for years,
and I continued to hate my own body, independent of what I weighed.
Pregnancy, college, separation, medical residency.
The years passed by, my weight varied, and the dissatisfaction was always there.
It’s not normal to hate yourself.
When I started practicing gynecology,
I began to realize how physical appearance affects the self-esteem of women,
and how much low self-esteem affects all the rest of their lives.
And so, seeing my story in them
I could look inside and realize
that neither they nor I could keep living like this.
I started to study about this issue to try to understand
why we hate our body and our physical appearance so much.
A century ago, women’s bodies were kept hidden under long skirts and dresses.
After the great world wars, when women were recruited to work,
clothing styles needed to adapt to our new functions.
And so women’s bodies began to be more exposed,
and consequently becaame targets of criticism and comparison.
Industry discovered in women,
or rather, in women’s dissatisfaction,
an enormous source of profit,
and we became voracious consumers of products, surgeries, procedures,
or anything else that makes us look like the standard,
a standard that changes,
a standard that shouldn’t exist in a world as diverse as ours,
and a standard that kills.
According to the World Health Organization,
4.7% of Brazilians have an eating disorder,
a value that climbs to 10% in adolescence.
Image disorders occur in 3% of the population,
and they peak in adolescence.
Social reinforcement given by family, friends, and the media
for adolescents to have a slim body
is an important risk factor in the development of these disorders.
In 2019, Brazil overtook the US
as the country that performs the most plastic surgery in the world,
which is significant as the US has a population almost 50% bigger than ours.
In a 2018 survey performed by the Brazilian Society of Plastic Surgery,
Brazil performed 1.5 million surgeries,
with almost 5% being performed on people less that 18 years old.
In the same survey, they showed that almost 15% of those who had surgeries
had some type of image disorder.
With the patient reports, with my history, and with this data in hand,
I realized I needed to talk about this issue.
While I was studying and starting to talk about it,
the pandemic arrived and made everything much more complicated.
We stayed at home, ate out of anxiety or tedium,
and we stopped moving around like we did before.
The majority of us gained weight.
And the worry of many people
was much more about their weight gain than it was about the COVID pandemic.
It was exactly at that time I attended a patient who changed everything.
She was a simple woman
who was in a panic because she couldn’t or shouldn’t straighten her hair
to enter the maternity hospital to have her child.
Throughout the consultation, she truly agonized
about the shame of arriving with curly hair at the maternity hospital.
I tried to help her see that the best moment of her life was about to happen
and that curly hair is normal and nothing to be ashamed of.
She still hasn’t returned after giving birth,
but I hope she fully lived this moment,
free from the aesthetic pressure to have straightened hair.
It’s not normal to hate yourself.
That day, I got home and wrote about it on my social media.
Several people responded and started sharing their stories with me.
I received reports about hair transition,
weight variation due to illness and medication use,
pregnancy,
people suffering from dermatitis,
exaggerated hair loss, and excess body hair.
Several stories, different people, and the same feeling:
it’s OK to not be like the standard.
So I realized we could start a revolution together -
the loving yourself revolution.
But how do you learn to love yourself?
How do you look at your own body with love,
when we are constantly led to believe
that we are imperfect and not up to the standard?
Through self-acceptance.
Self-acceptance is recognizing your qualities, skills and abilities,
but also recognizing your flaws, mistakes, and imperfections,
and understanding it’s OK - you forgive yourself.
Self-acceptance teaches you to forgive yourself,
and it teaches you that no one is perfect.
You know you have fat, stretch marks, and cellulite - and that’s okay.
They’re marks of your history.
They don’t make you worse; they make you who you are.
But how to practice self-acceptance?
Theory is easy,
but practice is extremely difficult.
But it’s much harder to live a lifetime hating your own body.
It’s not normal to hate yourself.
We practice self-acceptance through self-care,
caring for our physical and mental health.
You search out a physical activity that gives you pleasure
and moves your body - for the love of it, not for hate.
This physical activity can change your appearance,
but that’s not the objective of it.
The goal is to feel well.
You repeat activities that give you pleasure -
reading, writing, painting, listening to music, caring for plants.
You learn to enjoy the time with yourself.
You want to do well.
In self-care, you stop following pages that make you feel bad or inadequate.
You learn to go offline, disconnect, and look around.
And you look what’s there inside you.
You learn to look at your body with gratitude.
Think about the functionality that each body part has:
When you look at your legs, don’t see cellulite, sagging, or stretch marks;
think of the infinity of places they allow you to go and get to know
and the activities they allow you to do.
Your arms are no reason to be ashamed or to hide in a photo;
they allow you to embrace, to write,
and they guide our hands, which are our greatest allies.
Think about how many things our hands allow us to do.
Is your belly saggy after pregnancy?
Your breasts too?
Look at how your body adapted perfectly well
to bring a life into the world,
and allowed that life to feed only from you for so long.
Do you have difficulty accepting aging?
Wrinkles tell our story. People get older.
Aging means being old.
How long will you fight against time and against yourself?
Let me propose an exercise to you.
Think of some part of the body that you don’t like.
Have you though of it?
Now think about some functionality it has, something this part allows you to do,
and be grateful for it every day.
Loving your own body doesn’t mean finding it to be beautiful and perfect.
It means seeing something in it far beyond what its physical appearance shows.
And what’s so important about all this that I came here to tell you?
Here are two big considerations:
First, when we learn to love ourselves, we become free.
You become your own best friend,
and this impacts everything else in your life,
including how you spend your money and your time.
Second, when we learn to love ourselves,
we create generations who learn to love themselves,
or rather, that don’t learn to hate themselves,
generations free of eating and image disorders.
Mothers and fathers are examples of love, including self-love and the lack of it.
It’s not normal to hate yourself.
My invitation is for you to learn to love yourself.
May you become your own best friend.
May you treat yourself kindly.
We don’t know when we learned to hate ourselves,
but we know when we can learn to love ourselves:
now.