Every Monday features a tip, activity, inspiring quote or some other tidbit that helps boost your body image, whether directly or indirectly — and hopefully kick-starts the week on a positive note!

Got a tip for improving body image? Email me at mtartakovsky at gmail dot com, and I’ll be happy to feature it. I’d love to hear from you!

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Body image goes beyond loving your body to really loving yourself. Like anything else it’s a process, and I know that self-love can sound intimidating and maybe even abstract.

That’s why I love photographer and blogger Vivenne McMaster’s current series, “14 Days of Self-Love,” on her beautiful blog. For 14 days, a different contributor offers their take on self-love along with an activity for learning and practicing self-love.

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A poor body image has a way of making you forget about the amazing moments in life, both big and small. It has a way of either helping you ignore them or stomping on them altogether. It has a way of making a positive occasion into a negative one. A compliment into an insult.

Instead of focusing on the beauty of a bouquet of flowers, you’re focused on the shape of your thighs. Instead of enjoying chatting with your friends, you’re conscious about the number of calories you’ve consumed.

Instead of enjoying a soothing walk and the stunning surroundings, you’re zeroed in on the mileage you’re making. Instead of getting excited about a beautiful occasion, you’re miserable in the fitting room, trying on your 10th outfit.

While we’re preoccupied with how our bodies look and spend valuable time bashing their inability to lose weight, their cellulite or stretch marks, we forget their true magnificence.

We forget not only what our bodies do for us, but what they are and the fantastic functions they perform every single second, minute, hour and day.

Remembering just how amazing our bodies are isn’t only important for improving body image; it’s important for self-image as a whole.

As Glenn Schiraldi, Ph.D, writes in his book, 10 Simple Solutions for Building Self-Esteem, “The way we experience our body typically corresponds to the way we experience our core selves. If we reject our bodies overall because of particular perceived flaws, we are also likely to condemn our core selves for some present imperfections.”

But we can learn to appreciate our bodies. And this can help us, according to Schiraldi, “to a adopt a more accepting attitude toward our inner selves.”

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It’s hard enough being an adult in today’s world, filled with weight-loss and diet commercials, airbrushed images, a relentless emphasis on appearance and an obsession with dieting and shame around eating.

Being a girl? Probably even more confusing and potentially damaging and demoralizing.

As I wrote in an older post on Weightless, tween and teen girls are just starting to form to their identities and figure out the world. They’re trying to make friends, yearning to belong and fit in, maybe even being bullied, dealing with a changing body, dealing with academic and other social pressures and trying to make sense of an often contradictory and damaging culture.

So what can parents and caregivers do to help girls grow up with a healthy sense of self?

Every Monday features a tip, activity, inspiring quote or some other tidbit that helps boost your body image, whether directly or indirectly — and hopefully kick-starts the week on a positive note!

Got a tip for improving body image? Email me at mtartakovsky at gmail dot com, and I’ll be happy to feature it. I’d love to hear from you!

{via etsy}

Building a positive body image is more than gaining a genuine appreciation for and acceptance of your body. It’s learning to love yourself as a whole. For many of us, this might seem like an overwhelming concept. But like I always say, it’s one step, one strategy, one tool at a time.

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I came out of the womb nervous, insecure and afraid — of everything from roller-coasters to exams to extreme emotions. (Likely thanks to a combo of genetics and birth trauma.)

I’ve lived most of my life second-guessing myself, being indecisive, listening to others (instead of myself) and truly believing that I wasn’t good enough as I was. That I needed to change many things.

My negative body image stemmed, in part, from these deeply ingrained beliefs. That I had to earn a positive body image by losing weight and looking a certain way. That I had to earn respect, love, connection and a meaningful life this way as well.

We’ve all had a pair of those jeans somewhere in our house. Jeans that haven’t fit us for years, but we keep anyway. Thinking, hoping and maybe even praying to fit back into them. Thinking that somehow fitting into them would shift our lives for the better.

In her book Life is a Verb: 37 Days to Wake Up, Be Mindful and Live Intentionally, Patti Digh talks about her high school Levi’s and what they represented.

Over the years they’ve become a symbol, a talisman, an icon of my perfect high school shape, that lean and strong teenage body that ran and hiked and climbed and bicycled everywhere, that simpler shape before broken hearts, sexual harassments, dead parents, business suits, big promotions, missed deadlines, inane meetings, working with mean people, being mean myself, dead friends, terrorist attacks, hydraulic systems failing on planes I happened to be on, and just plain living the overrated adult life.

Digh tried desperately to get into those jeans — to no avail. (Something else I bet we can all relate to.) She felt like an utter failure, despite her successful and fulfilling career, wonderful family, great friends and all-round good life.

Making art “is a remarkable tool for recovering our right to be heard, letting go of perfectionism, and restoring self-acceptance,” according to art therapists Mindy Jacobson-Levy and Maureen Foy-Tornay in their book Finding Your Voice through Creativity: The Art and Journaling Workbook for Disordered Eating.

“And it can foster self-discovery by opening new, symbolic doors into our hearts and minds. Creativity connects us to our ‘inner voice’; healing occurs when we listen!”

Their book features a variety of interesting and valuable activities. Today, I’m sharing four artful activities to help you heal your relationship with food and with yourself.

After each activity, a journal entry follows so you can dig deeper. Because it’s better to do the activity before reading the journal entries, I’ve included those at the bottom. So if you’re interested in doing any of the activities, avoid peeking at the entries!

Today, I’m honored to reprint a beautiful and inspiring post by Sui from cynosure. Sui writes about how each of us deserves better, whether it’s building a positive body image, following our passions, taking better care of ourselves or embracing and loving ourselves.

And as mentioned yesterday, there is another giveaway! Sui is giving away a “you deserve better” poster to one lucky reader. (That’s the poster above!) All you have to do to be eligible to win is a) subscribe to cynosure by email or rss b) subscribe to the newsletter and c) leave a comment letting us know that you did both. That’s it!

Oh, I’ll announce the winner next Friday, so you have plenty of time to sign up and leave a comment.

Have a fantastic weekend everyone!

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On Monday we talked about embracing imperfection, and the fact that the pursuit of perfectionism pervades all areas of our lives, if we let it.

Since then, the topic of perfectionism has still been swirling in my mind. Because so many of us get caught up in striving for a flawless something or everything and live with a fear of making mistakes. Which feeds our negative body image and negative view of ourselves. It holds us to ridiculous expectations, sabotages our success and even erodes our happiness.