The thing about conditions is there is no peace with conditions. There is no freedom. In order to even like my body I had to starve it and be unkind to it. I had to turn down social occasions and ignore both my hunger and my tiredness. The thing I eventually realized was that I could not hate my body into something I could love because that is not how love works.
The most beautiful freedom is when I wake up in the morning. I don't have to do a single thing to like my body. I don't have a single condition for liking it, I just do.
Sometimes I think about body love as love for a child. They don't have to do a single thing to be loved, they just have to be. There are no conditions.
When I let go of conditions for loving my body, I found freedom and I found peace and in finding those, I found me.
I learned that beauty isn't in my size, the shape of my stomach, or arms or thighs.
Beauty was in the world reflected back at me.
When I had light in my soul, people were drawn to me.
When I was hungry, lacking energy, lacking life...there was little beauty reflected in the world that I saw.
In order to live fully, I first had to be full.
If I wanted a bigger life, I needed a bigger body, because my frail body could never hold all the richness that came my way through recovering.
Beauty, I learned, was all around me but it first started within me.