Your body is allowed to change over time.
Bodies are constantly evolving, responding to shifts in age, hormones, lifestyle, and environmental factors. It's natural for your body to adapt and change over time, and these changes can be viewed as morally neutral, rather than problems to be solved. Expecting your body to remain exactly the same as it was in the past ignores the complexity and beauty of growth. Acknowledging that it's okay for your body to change creates space for self-acceptance and encourages a more compassionate approach to self-care and body image.
It’s unrealistic to expect an adult's body to be the same as when you were a teen.
Our teenage years are often marked by rapid growth and hormonal shifts, which play a significant role in how our bodies look and function. As we move into adulthood, our bodies naturally settle into different shapes, sizes, and metabolic rates. Holding onto the expectation that your adult body should mirror your teenage one can set you up for frustration and disappointment. Accepting the changes that come with adulthood allows for more realistic expectations and supports the understanding that your body’s needs and appearance will shift in positive ways as you age.
Societal glorification and commodification of youth contributes to the desire for women to maintain a childlike appearance, promoting an unrealistic ideal that values thinness, smallness, and even immaturity over strength, health, and maturity. The cultural prioritization of remaining youthful not only ignores the natural and healthy process of aging but also sends a harmful message that a woman’s value is tied to youth in that society values a woman not for wisdom, lived experience, intelligence or strength, but rather prefers someone they can control and retain power over. This can lead to unhealthy behaviors aimed at preserving a “forever young” body, rather than embracing the beauty and wisdom that come with aging. Women deserve to grow, change, and flourish at every stage of life without the pressure to remain in a perpetual state of youthfulness. Letting go of this societal fixation frees women to embrace their adult selves with confidence and self-acceptance.
If you’ve been dieting or exercising in a way that’s extreme, it's unrealistic to expect your body to maintain those results if you stop that extreme routine.
Extreme dieting and exercise regimens often push the body to a place of imbalance. These short-term changes can lead to temporary results, but once you return to a more sustainable routine, your body will naturally readjust to a healthier equilibrium. The pressure to maintain extreme habits indefinitely is not only unrealistic but also potentially harmful to your physical and mental health. Recognizing that your body cannot and should not be expected to function optimally under extreme conditions helps in fostering a healthier, more sustainable relationship with food, movement, and self-care.
If you need to maintain an extreme routine, then maybe the weight and size you are at that time isn’t realistic or healthy.
If staying at a particular weight or size requires constant restriction or punishing exercise, that may be a signal that the weight or size isn’t naturally sustainable for you. The body thrives when given a balance of nourishment, movement, and rest. If you find yourself needing to maintain extreme habits to stay at a specific size, it may be worth exploring whether that goal aligns with what’s truly healthy for your body long-term. Health and well-being encompass more than just appearance, and tuning into what feels good and sustainable in your body is a powerful step toward authentic wellness.
Celebrities and models don’t always look like that; they go through periods of extreme diets and exercise prior to upcoming jobs to appear a certain way.
The images of celebrities and models we often see are typically the result of months of preparation, including strict diets, intense workout routines, and even retouching in post-production. These carefully curated looks are rarely reflective of how these individuals appear in everyday life. Many models and celebrities openly admit that the extreme measures they take for a role, photoshoot, or red-carpet event are unsustainable for regular life. Recognizing that what you see in the media is not a daily reality can help reduce unrealistic comparisons and remind you that all bodies fluctuate and change—even those of people in the public eye.
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