Love Your Body

With summer just around the corner, store windows, magazines, and commercials keep reminding us that “bikini season” is upon us. Although there is undeniable pressure for women to look perfect year-round, summer can be especially hard on us and our body image. We find ourselves trying on bathing suits and leaving the dressing room discouraged, feeling the need to lose another 10 pounds or go on a new diet. From a young age, we’re taught by society to look for our flaws and imperfections instead of our natural beauty when we look in the mirror. We’re taught to critique and tear down our own self-esteem instead of build ourselves up. And nothing about that is beautiful.

When talking about positive body image, I usually always think of the iconic chick-flick Mean Girls and the scene where Regina, Gretchen, and Karen have to teach Cady how to find flaws in her appearance. “My pores are HUGE,” “I hate my calves,” and “I have man shoulders” are the negative comments the girls have to say about themselves, even though they are all obviously beautiful. Unfortunately, this scene is not as far removed from real life as it should be. Too often we’re taught to hate our bodies instead of love them, which ultimately results in seeing ourselves as “ugly.” The solution to overcoming this mindset is certainly not always easy, especially when we’ve grown up in a society that reinforces the practice. But just like you can learn to hate your body, you can always teach yourself how to love your body too. Here are 5 things I personally love doing to strengthen positive self-love in simple, every-day ways.

Photo Credits: Courtney Bailey

1. Write yourself love notes

In my sophomore year of a college, a group of students decided to go all over campus and post notes that said things like “you are so beautiful” and “you look gorgeous today” on all the mirrors in our bathrooms. You wouldn’t think those notes would be so impactful, but it was amazing just how much I would find myself smiling after reading them. I stood a little taller, I beamed a little brighter, and I felt happier the rest of the day. I decided to try doing the same thing in my own bathroom at home, and I still always get a boost of self-confidence in the mornings when I see “you look gorgeous” hanging over my mirror. Try to write yourself loving, reaffirming notes to remind yourself just how beautiful you really are and hang them in a place where you can read them every day.

2. Don’t weigh yourself for a while

Although there are some medical situations where it’s necessary to keep daily track of your weight, there is really no general need for weighing ourselves every morning or evening. In high school, I began regularly working out for the first time with the intention of living a healthier lifestyle. In the first few months, I would weigh myself after every workout, slowly becoming discouraged and obsessed with keeping a certain number on the scale. Of course, I didn’t think about water retention, muscle weight, etc. and I felt like I wasn’t working hard enough, which couldn’t have been farther from the truth. I had become so fixated on scale numbers that I forgot the whole reason I had begun regularly exercising in the first place: to be healthy and beautiful, inside and out. I was actually making a lot of progress and living a much healthier lifestyle, and it showed through in my complexion, mood, and overall body image. But I wasn’t able to fully enjoy this new-found healthy, beautiful lifestyle when I was constantly criticizing myself for not weighing a certain amount. I had to discipline myself to get off the scale for a while, only checking it every so often. Since then, I have found it much easier to embrace my body and love it with all its unique features. When numbers on a scale are no longer competing for your attention, you can more easily direct your thoughts towards viewing yourself through loving and confident eyes.

3. Pamper yourself

While telling yourself you’re beautiful and important is definitely a must, showing yourself appreciation and love is also extremely important. Whenever you take the time to treat yourself to a pedicure, have an at-home spa day, soak in a bubble bath, or get a relaxing massage, you’re sending yourself the positive message that you’re worthy of feeling beautiful because you are beautiful. No matter how busy my semester gets, I always make sure to treat myself to a candlelit lavender bubble bath at LEAST once a month (I usually need it once a week!). By giving myself just an hour one weekend night to use luxurious products I love and have “me-time,” I really have learned how to value myself. Pampering yourself teaches you that you are beautiful and deserve to be treated like you are. So don’t hesitate to buy yourself that expensive mud mask next time you’re in Ulta or try out that new DIY bath bomb recipe you found on Pinterest. You’re beautiful, and you deserve it!

4. Surround yourself with positive people

I seriously cannot stress enough just how important positive, encouraging friends are. If you hang out with people like Regina George who constantly criticize either you or themselves, you will notice yourself starting to pick up that nasty little habit too. Just like the saying “you are what you eat,” you are who you hang out with. Start listening to how your friends talk about themselves, you, and other girls, and if you ever hear negative comments about appearances, hair, clothes, etc., gently discourage these sort of conversations. Instead, you and your girlfriends have to practice building each other up. Genuinely compliment one another and think of beauty as being more than skin deep. If you notice your friends continuing this behavior after you’ve made attempts to stop it, the healthiest thing for your own body image and self-love is to walk away from their toxic influence. Surround yourself with people that build you up and teach you to build them up in return.

Photo Credits: Caitlin Bailey

 

5. Tell yourself you’re beautiful

While writing yourself notes, pampering yourself, and surrounding yourself with positive friends helps grow a beautiful self-love over time, the number-one thing you can do for positive body image is to simply tell yourself you’re beautiful. When you try on a swimsuit and are tempted to feel self-conscious, say aloud, “I love everything about my body. I’m beautiful.” When you wake up with a hormonal breakout or dark circles under your eyes from pulling an all-nighter, look in your vanity mirror and say, “I love everything about my body. I’m beautiful.” And when an insecure girl at school comments something negative on your Instagram photo or a boy rejects you because you weren’t “pretty enough,” take a selfie and caption it: “I love everything about my body. I’m beautiful.”

Good Vibes: 3 “Hippie” Ways to Stay Beautiful Mentally

The end of April: for most people, it’s a beautiful time with birds singing, warming temperatures, and sunny days. But for college students, it’s several days of all-nighters, binge-eating, and mental breakdowns. The struggle IS indeed real when it comes to surviving the last few weeks of classes and finals, and from the breakouts, dark circles, and zombie eyes we see all over campus, we know the beauty struggle is real too. There’s no way we can expect to get a full 8 hours of sleep every night, eat clean foods, AND keep up with our healthy beauty regimens at the height of academic crunch time, so outward beauty is going to have to take a back seat for a few weeks. But inward beauty—especially the beauty of a healthy, happy mind—definitely has to become a priority.

Mental health is a huge component of being beautiful inside and out. How you take care of your mind affects how you take care of your body. If you allow stress and anxiety to negatively impact your thoughts, you will also inevitably allow negativity to affect how you feel about yourself. Those all-too-familiar doubts, fears of failure, and drops in self-confidence we experience at the end of each semester are all results of stress overpowering our minds. Only by learning to beautify our minds through healthy, ugly thought-banishing care can we really start to experience a self-love that radiates from the inside out.

Photo Credits: Courtney Bailey

 

There are a few simple, practical ways you can nurture mental health on your own. Since Earth Day was yesterday and that “boho vibe” was all over social media, I was inspired to share three of my favorite holistic, “hippie” methods that work wonders for de-stressing and soothing your mind.

1. Meditation

No mental health care list would be complete without meditation. This is probably the #1 best thing you can do to beautify your mind. There are hundreds of techniques and methods for practicing meditation, and getting started can initially seem very overwhelming and almost mysterious. If you’re like me and most college students, you have no idea what a mantra or chakra is, and you really don’t have the time to research ancient breathing practices in the middle of studying for finals. Though some meditation rituals can be more complex, at its core the practice is actually fairly simple. The goal of meditation is to quiet the mind and force it to focus on only one thing for a set time period. This helps control the stress and raging anxious thoughts inside us. You can choose a word, a phrase like “ohm”, a mental picture, or anything else that you like for your mental object of focus. Set your alarm for 5-10 minutes, close your eyes, and gently force your mind to focus only on your object for the entire time allotment as you breathe deeply. And that’s it! You’ve just meditated. Keep this practice up once a day, and you’ll be amazed at how much more calm and efficient your mind is in high-stress situations

Photo Credits: Courtney Bailey

 

2. Essential oils

If you use Pinterest or know any suburban blogger mom, you are probably very familiar with the essential oil craze. Personally, I’m still a bit skeptical about all their supposed healing powers, but for sensory calming, they are pretty magical. The best way you can employ essential oils for mental health is to use them in a diffuser. An essential oil diffuser is usually fairly affordable, makes your room smell nice, AND helps relax you. Why wouldn’t you want to invest in a product like that? A few tried-and-true oils that help create those same “good vibrations” we feel walking into Earthbound Trading Company are: lavender, frankincense, Roman chamomile, ylang ylang, and peppermint oil. These oils are famous for their mental health properties and are extremely effective at combating stress, anxiety, and even depression. You can use these oils alone or buy scent blends that combine them with other soothing oils.

3. Teas

Sleep-deprived college students always turn to coffee for headache relief, pick-me-ups, and de-stressing. However, coffee is what the book Eat Pretty would call a “beauty betrayer.” Caffeine is not only bad for your outer beauty (talk about a complexion wrecker!), but it can disrupt mental health by creating caffeine crashes that lead to greater anxiety, stress, and headaches. Instead, a better beverage for mental health is herbal, non-caffeinated tea. Not a huge fan of black teas? Don’t worry, because these teas generally taste much sweeter, fruitier, and more floral than black teas. Just like with essential oils, there are dozens of tea flavors and combinations to choose from. However, my personal favorites include: chamomile, lavender, peppermint, and anything citrus (orange, lemon, etc.). You’ll notice that a lot of these tea flavors are the same as essential oils I just listed. These scents and flavors are doubly effective when diffused and steeped, and you’ll find that drinking lavender tea in a room that smells like lavender is probably one of the most relaxing feelings in the world.

Beauty In, Beauty Out

Even with toxin-free makeup and chemically-clean cosmetic products, I still often face the skin care woes of most college girls: dark circles, acne, huge pores—you name it. I can use the purest organic cleanser in my local health food store and still wake up with a face full of zits the next morning. And, like all girls who try to take good care of their skin and never go to sleep with their makeup on, I wonder what I ever did to deserve going through beauty hell. I always assumed that the blame for all skin troubles belonged entirely to my cosmetic products. Wrong.

So much of what we see on the outside begins with what happens on the inside. What we eat, how much we sleep, how stressed we get—all of these play a huge role in how our skin looks. The journey towards healthy, natural beauty is truly an inside-out process, and to get the complexion you’ve always dreamed of, you have to care about what goes in to your body as much as you do about what goes on it.

Photo Credits: Courtney Bailey

1. The Right Diet

 

Let’s talk about chocolate for a minute. Or Girl Scout cookies. Or Oreos. I, unfortunately, have an extremely big sweet tooth, and I’m addicted to anything with sugar. And sugar, more specifically the refined kind found in all my favorite desserts, is a major beauty wrecker. According to Eat Pretty by Jolene Hart (aka, my favorite beauty book of all time), refined sugar directly contributes to acne, wrinkles, cellulite, age spots, and overall dull skin. Gluten, dairy, fried foods, alcohol, and caffeine are also healthy skin no-no’s. Of course, avoiding all skin enemies in our food is impossible, especially when we’ve had a long day and just need a large fry from McDonald’s. But working towards moderation, conscious eating, and long-term lifestyle changes is an essential step to healthy beauty. Eat more leafy greens, buy organic produce, have a detox weekend, order your coffee decaf. Make little beauty-boosting diet decisions every week, and you’ll find that the occasional slice of pizza every now and then won’t be nearly as damaging as having pizza every day. Healthy beauty all depends on a healthy diet.

2. Enough Sleep

Healthy beauty also depends on a healthy lifestyle, including sleep habits. Ever since we were kids, we’ve heard that we need at least 8 hours of “beauty sleep” each night. This isn’t just an old wives’ tale, friends. A healthy adult needs 7-8 hours of sleep each night, and adolescents usually need even more than this (yes, this includes most young adults and college students too). So, should you skip that 8 a.m. class or miss your morning train to catch up on some extra z’s? Not necessarily. Instead, work on establishing a healthy bedtime routine. Soak in a lavender salt bath, write in your journal, listen to a soothing record—whatever helps you unwind most, do it 1 hour-30 minutes before you need to be asleep to ensure you fall asleep faster and stay asleep longer. And most importantly: turn off your cell phone an hour before bed. Nothing gets in the way of deep, renewing beauty rest like having Twitter notifications and texts come through as you’re trying to fall asleep. Healthy beauty begins with loving yourself and your body, and what better way to show your body some love than to let it get enough rest and rejuvenation each night?

Photo Credits: Courtney Bailey

 

3. Reduced Stress

Perhaps one of the greatest inside-out beauty betrayers is stress. When an important job interview, difficult midterm, or huge sporting tournament comes our way, it isn’t uncommon for us to wake up with acne and inflamed skin. This is because stress and anxiety cause an overproduction of hormones, such as adrenaline and cortisol, that mess with the natural balance and functioning of our bodies. All sorts of things get thrown out of whack when we stress, such as an overproduction of oil in our sebaceous glands and fat and water retention around our waists. We can’t choose when we’ll get hit by stressful situations, but we can choose how we deal with the stress. Yoga, exercise, bubble baths, deep breathing, massages, chick-flick movie nights, and coffee dates with your girlfriends are all wonderful ways to combat stress and the negative beauty effects it causes. Take care of yourself and know when you need “me time.” Learning how to effectively manage stress before it spirals out of control (and you find yourself sobbing into a tub of cookie dough ice cream at 2 a.m.) is one of the most beautifying, healthy, and loving things you can do for yourself and your body.

Be Your Own Valentine

Valentine’s Day is probably the only holiday I can think of that’s truly damaging to a girl’s self-esteem. As soon as February 1 rolls around, Twitter gets flooded with pictures of giant teddy bears, Tiffany and Co. jewelry boxes, and red rose bouquets captioned “goals.” Instagram bombards us with date night photos and gushy love confessions. Everywhere we go, shops, grocery stores, and even pharmacies pressure us into feeling that something is wrong with us if we aren’t drowning in a pile of heart-shaped gifts on February 14. Unless you have a Valentine, you’re not good enough. You’re unlovable.

Photo Credits: Courtney Bailey

 

The purpose of this blog is to document my own journey towards embracing a healthy approach to beauty while inspiring women everywhere to do the same. But I don’t think we can really begin talking about that until we learn to combat the negative messages society constantly sends us about our self-worth. Valentine’s Day is only one example of how societal pressure makes us think that our value is based in superficial things, like how many boys ask us out, how many likes our selfie gets, or how popular we are. We are constantly told by commercials, advertisements, and pop culture that if our hair is perfect and our clothes are name-brand, we’ll be more attractive and more desirable. And over time, as we are saturated with these messages more and more, we actually start to believe them.

The famous saying “true beauty comes from within” often gets over-quoted in a half-hearted way, causing its truth and poignancy to be completely overlooked. The reality is, perfect hair and likes on Instagram may fill you with confidence for a day, but if those are the only things you base your self-esteem in, you’re going to feel pretty worthless the next time you have a bad hair day or get a negative comment on your photo. The reason so many of us feel so depressed and down on ourselves around Valentine’s Day is that we forget to let our beauty and confidence come from within. We cave in to society’s peer pressure and base how we view ourselves on how other people view us. And if those other people (i.e., our would-be Valentines) don’t love us the way we want them to, we don’t love ourselves either.

Photo Credits: Courtney Bailey

 

This Valentine’s Day, I want to challenge us all to really focus on separating our self-esteem from the opinions of other people. True, healthy beauty begins with completely loving and accepting yourself, whether you’re single or taken. And no matter how pressuring the Twitter posts and Target aisles get this weekend, determine to fully love and accept yourself despite them.

Get yourself a box of chocolates.

Go shopping and buy yourself whatever you want.

Take yourself on a date to see your favorite movie.

Look in the mirror and tell yourself you’re beautiful… Because you are.