I don’t remember thinking about my body in my childhood. My relationship with it was quite a happy, functional one: it allowed me to run, swim as much as I wanted to, stretch, feel warm or cold, or warned me through my tummy whenever I ate too much ice cream.
But when teenage-hood arrived, something changed: there were times in which I felt too tall, too skinny. Others where I eagerly wanted to hide my breast. Were my legs too tall, too short? Was I too blonde, or not blonde enough? Comparison-age had begun and brought along the age of ‘not being enough something’: are you one of the most beautiful? Are you one of the most sexy? Be less than ‘that’ and you are doomed.
I am now aware of how much I punished my body with diets, exercise, wrong food and cigarettes, just for the sake of trying to have ‘that body’. Until the day I woke up in my forties and said to myself: ‘I have a great, healthy body, enough of bullshit’.
Why is it that no one teaches us to praise our body since childhood?
Our body is the most sophisticated ‘machinery’ that has ever been created. So brilliant and efficient that not even our intelligence has ever been able to design something similar. It works 24/7, extracting oxygen from the outside and distributes it to every organ, tissue and cell. It filters and pumps one of our elixirs – blood – to nurture and balance our mood, our bio chemicals and vital levels. It digests unimaginable things, even those it cannot associate to any human menu, and manages to pull out all that may harm us. It allow us to walk, jump, kick, run, conceive and raise another human being, and also sense the most subtle things: a warm breeze that announces the summer, the slow descent of temperature before autumn, a music that fulfills us with joy.
Our body is so extraordinary it even warns us when we are pushing the limits too far, and makes us sick in order to stop us and ask ourselves what the fuck are we doing with our lives.
And still, we do not praise it.
And still, we do act as if we could live without it.
And still we, women, intoxicate ourselves with comparison when the truth is we were blessed with a perfect body, one that only asks us to do our part.
In this 8th edition of Womanity, we are bringing you examples of people that have worked out their relationships with their bodies: my beautiful 91 year-old mother, an oncology surgeon, a woman who lost one of her arms, a woman who has been helping people to develop themselves throughout her life, a CrossFit trainer who was a soldier, a photographer who loves bodies, and a man that worships women.
Dear you, this Body edition is not about the perfect bodies you see in the magazines. It’s about the perfect body that lies right there, from your head to your toes.
