How To Love Your Plus Size Body

Are you a plus size women? Are you worried about your plus size body? The latest thing right now is selfcare, which has been brought to light with the help of Wentworth Miller who was fat-shamed and rose above it with dignity and honesty about himself. Since then, he has started encouraging people to care for themselves every day.

That’s a beautiful thing, but is it enough? Self-care is incredibly important — but we can’t just casually care for ourselves and expect to find peace. We need to learn to actually love ourselves.

“You have to love yourself before someone else can love you.”

“If you don’t love yourself, how can someone else love you?”

“Love yourself first and then everything else falls in line.”

We’ve all either heard these things at one point or another (or maybe even said them ourselves), but these tired “sayings” can sound so flippant sometimes. It’s not that easy. We wake up and look in the mirror — or avoid the mirror all together — and hide because we have been TAUGHT to hate ourselves. We’ve been taught that if we don’t look a certain way that we simply aren’t good enough.

For me, personally, I was fortunate to grow up with a lot of unconditional love, so that got me off to a great start. But, I am 48 now and when I need to learn to LOVE myself more, the things that help me are the following:

1. Spend time with your close family and friends.

Seeing the love you give to your family and friends reflected back to you can change your perspective and make you realize how much you're REALLY worth.

2. Spend time near things that are much larger than you. 

Redwood trees, mountains, animals – whatever makes you happy. It may sound silly or outlandish, but it really does help to put things about your OWN body into perspective (It does for me).

3. Allow yourself to do things that make you feel really good. 

For plus size women, that is things like hugs, cuddles, volunteering, etc. Writing blogs like these that might touch even one other human who needs it. Doing things that make me feel good; that helps plus size women to feel proud of themselves and love myself.

4. Pay careful attention of the wonders of the world.

Appreciate how everyone’s process is so unique. Pay attention to how bodies are so quirky and weird and wonderful.

This last suggestion got me thinking about actionable ideas for how you can begin to love yourself in the exact body you have right NOW (in my case, it’s my fat body). I wanted to have a discussion to share ideas about how you can learn to love yourself.