6 Steps Toward Body Freedom When Self-Love Feels Unreachable

Becoming friends with my body has been a long journey — one that seems more like a spiral than a straight line. Part of what I wish someone had told me when I was starting to untangle from a web of body shame was that forming a compassionate relationship with my body would not happen overnight.
And that’s what I want to talk to you about today. Today, I’m going to outline some of the six steps that I’ve noticed on my own way to feeling more freedom in my relationship with my body.
However, before I do that, I want to clear something up. It’s time to set some things straight: What’s the difference between Body Positivity and Self-Love?
If you haven’t ever heard the podcast “She’s All Fat,” Sophie and April do an amazing job of explaining this in their first episode “Fat Narratives”. While you’re busy downloading every single one of their episodes, I’m just going to give you a quick low-down so that you’ve got a baseline with which to read this article.
Body Positivity vs. Self-Love
Body Positivity is a political movement that promotes equality and justice for all bodies. This includes race, gender identity, level of ability, mental and physical health, age, socioeconomic class, sexual orientation, and so on and so forth.
Basically, all of these bodies deserve to be respected, to have access to opportunities and needs, and there’s some fighting that needs to be done to make sure that this happens.
Self-Love, on the other hand, is about your own sense of self, how you show yourself the love you need and deserve, and develop a sense of worth and positive self-image.
Basically, Self-Love is all about you — and Body Positivity isn’t.
Both Self-Love and Body Positivity are important to fight for — and they can work concurrently to create individual and systemic growth and healing. Today, what we’re focusing on is how to move towards Self-Love and freedom within your own body.
No amount of Self-Love is going to change the fact that fat people are actively discriminated against and passed up for promotions in favor of their thinner counterparts. It isn’t going to change the fact that disabled bodies are routinely denied access to basic needs and are incarcerated in nursing homes rather than receiving the care they deserve. It won’t change our systemic privileging of Whiteness or the fact that many trans and queer individuals live at the mercy of rapidly changing laws that determine who they can marry, what bathroom they can use, and whether local businesses will be condoned when they refuse them service.
Self-Love is an inside process and everyone deserves it. And it doesn’t change the external reality that certain bodies are seen as worthy of Self-Love by society, and others are systemically devalued and discriminated against.
Then Isn’t Body Positivity More Important?
For systemic change? Yes. In getting to that change and making it last? I don’t know if you can live that bad-ass activist lifestyle, fighting for bodies’ rights to exist, if you’re unwilling to recognize your own right to exist.
However, along that journey, it’s important to recognize that Self-Love is more culturally revolutionary for some bodies than it is for others.
Overarching this, my own agenda is that I hold the hope that when people love and accept themselves, they are more likely to extend that respect out towards other bodies. I also believe that our internal world is sacred ground, that we have the right to return there for safety and solace when the world has pushed us around.
So, maybe you’re thinking, Yeah, I know, but how do I get to Self-Love or Body Freedom if I can’t even wake up before thinking something negative about myself? And rightfully so.
In a world that bombards us with products to fix our flaws, diets to make us beautiful, and a confusing mixture of pressure to feel good and pressure to feel not good enough so that we can be better, it’s hard enough to foster the first step.
But let me tell you what I’ve found.
The first step isn’t loving yourself.
The first step is about being honest with yourself, seeing your goal, and putting one foot in front of the other.
Step #1: Body Tolerance
The first step of medicine is “Do No Harm”. This is the same step that you’re going to take with your own body.
You can’t be expected to love something that you’ve spent 10, 20, or 30+ years learning how to hate and control. What we’re going to try and do in this stage is just stop lying to ourselves.
That dress you’ve had hanging up in your closet for 10 years because someday, you’re going to fit back into it? Those jeans that were tight when you bought them and that you use as motivation to get yourself to the gym? Stop pretending that you’re who you were 10 years ago. For that matter, stop pretending you’re who you will be 10 years in the future, too!
This is a painful process. Expect back sliding. Expect challenge. Expect a flavor of resentment for who you have pretended to be.
There is no thinner, prettier, more graceful you trapped inside of you waiting to get out. You are who you are.
You don’t have to like it; you just have to look it in the face and say, “I tolerate your existence, even if I don’t fully want to live with it forever.”
In this phase, you don’t have to promise to love yourself. In fact, it’s probably best not to.
You just have to agree that you want to change and that, at this point, it feels like the costs are higher for staying the same than they are for changing.
Call a truce. Put down your weapons. Give it a real try.
Step #2: Body Respect
In my little sister’s school (which is the coolest), they have a rule for how to treat other people. It’s one of the only rules, and I’ve always found it inspiring.
This is it: “You don’t have to be friends, but you have to be friendly”.
This is the way you might start thinking about your body journey. You don’t have to like your body, but you do have to show it respect and decency.
One thing you might want to do in this stage is think, If my body were someone else, would I say this out loud to them? Would I think that they deserve it?
Here, we’re trying to mitigate some damage. This isn’t about kindness; it’s about causing less violence and noticing what hurts.
In this stage, you might start recognizing the parts of yourself that would love to hang out in the sunshine and not think about covering up your “problem areas”. You might encourage yourself to take a deep breath instead of muttering insults to yourself in a changing room (#worstlightingever). You might even avoid a circumstance in which you know you’ll be unable to treat yourself with the same respect you would offer to someone else.
Step #3: Body Acceptance
You can’t change something that you aren’t able to accept.
I’m guessing you might have heard this before. However, it’s one thing to know this in theory; it’s another in reality to feel like being laughed at by the universe.
When I went to Naropa (a Buddhist-founded university), I learned about the story of the Buddha becoming enlightened after fighting the demon god Mara. Becoming enlightened only temporarily dissuaded Mara, and he came back again, banging down the Buddha’s door with all of his demonly might. The Buddha, rather than fighting, would invite Mara in for tea, sitting comfortably with him as long as he wished to remain. Mara would stay for a little bit and then eventually would go along his way.
This story is told to illustrate the benefits of “inviting your demons in for tea.”
Since probably you’re not enlightened (but if you are #congrats), you don’t have to start by meeting your demons with kindness and appreciation of their inner wisdom (although #spoiler, we might do some of that if we work together).
Sometimes we just start by looking and being honest with what is. The key to this step is patience, and a gesture towards compassion. It doesn’t have to feel good to accept. However, it may take less effort than trying to fight what already is.
The effort that you would have spent fighting may even be spent in other areas that help to build up, rather than tear down, who you are right now.
Step #4: Body Appreciation
Appreciating something isn’t the same as loving it, sure. Appreciating is being grateful for the little things.
Once you’ve learned to look straight at your body, and accept it for what it is, then it’s time to think of all the things that you’ve accomplished in this body.
In DBT (Dialectical Behavioral Therapy), part of how you start to build skills for emotional regulation and resilience is by “Accumulating Positives.” The trick to building up positive experiences is that it has to be both feasible and explicit.
This means that if you do the same positive thing twice, once with awareness and once absentmindedly, then actually you didn’t reap the positive benefits of the second experience that you were fully spaced out for.
When people are moving into Body Appreciation, it is time to start recognizing when your body was and is awesome for you.
Maybe it isn’t your appearance yet, but the way you feel when you go for a walk in the sunshine, when you take a deep breath of air, or when you smell coffee first thing in the morning.
In this phase, you’re going to go hunting for the joy in your life.
I specifically want to note that you don’t need to be buying 80,000 bath bombs, quitting your job to take long walks on the beach, and staying up way past your bedtime to gaze up open-mouthed at the stars. You can just make a list of the things that you already love, that are doable and enjoyable about your body, and just make sure you’re doing and noticing one of those things, at least once a day.
Step #5: Body Love
So maybe you’re here and are thinking, But isn’t Body Love the final step? Isn’t that what I’m working so hard to achieve? Bear with me for one more minute — I’m getting there.
Do you remember the feeling of falling in love? For some reason, suddenly you can think of 15 synonyms for the texture of their eyelashes, and even things that you’re normally bored by become the loveliest symphony when spilling from their lips?
Well, I also remember falling in love. I’m not sure about how it went for you, but for me that phase didn’t last forever. Eventually, no matter how much deeper and resilient that love grew, there was a point at which I was only willing to hear so much about their dream of playing badminton with a zebra when I’m running late for work.
There’s something about the infatuation stage that glosses over all blemishes and faults. It’s like the Photoshop of the heart.
At worst, you start thinking, OMG who is this monster who won’t stop talking about themselves that I have nothing in common with (#beenthere). At best, I’ve thought, Gosh, I can’t wait to find out all the other things about you that I couldn’t see and learn from when you were so high up there on that pedestal.
Point is, you’re welcome to love yourself as long and hard as you can, but just like any genuine relationship, there are high and low points.
Even those of us who love ourselves a lot (#hi) wake up some days and think, Whoa there, you’re not looking so hot today (#gradschool or #periodweek or #jetlag).
The reason Body Love isn’t the last step is because you can’t break up with your body if you’re still doing the life thing. So finding that unconditional love, resilience, and honesty about the possibility of having challenges is vital to not creating another spiral from confidence back down to shame.
Step #6: Body Freedom
Now that you’re at step six, I have to break the news: In my experience, these stages don’t just happen once. They happen over and over.
However, much like a wave, each time the ocean comes back to meet the shore, it’s a little bit different. Sometimes the sand is warmer; sometimes the moon is urgently calling the tide back towards the ocean’s deep belly. Sometimes there are people playing at the shore’s lacey edges.
When you return, continuously, to the shores of your insecurities and the realities of living in a body that ages, flourishes, feels pain and joy and nervousness, you will return to a slightly different shore with a slightly different wave.
With Body Freedom, there’s an understanding that we are free to not love ourselves every day.
Our self-worth, the respect we give to ourselves and others, does not depend upon whether we’re feeling rockstar fabulous or sick and tired.
Once you’ve explored the different subtle steps towards Body Freedom, then you can know that you’re welcome to reach for Respect when you’re not able to Accept or Appreciate.
Body Freedom is acknowledging that.
Because the only way to get where you want to go is to start where you are.
Are you ready to explore your own steps toward body freedom? Do you want some support along the way? Learn more about Sara’s work (and inquire about her services) here.
