Let me start off by saying that I am a proud owner of flabs and love handles. Writing this piece took a lot of courage because, as it would it seem, social media puts this weird pressure on us to look good all the time.
Every morning, before I get ready to go to work, I look at myself in the mirror for a few minutes, wearing my undergarments. I take a quick look at my body, scanning it the way creepy men do on the streets. I judge my body from left to right and top to bottom. However, lately, at the end of this ogle session, I straight up say ‘Fuck It’ – Not because I am sick and tired of my body, but because I refuse to let those thoughts consume me.
There’s something about flat tummies that people find hot and, in some cases, inspiring. Thanks to Katrina Kaif and social media influencers who’ve flaunted their flat tummies, people find the flat tummy fad extremely sexy. Inspiring because a lot of hard work has gone into the making of flat tummies. But, have you stopped to wonder why we’re all obsessed with flat tummies?
Millennials have secretly been focussing their time and energy Googling ways to lose flabby tummies, exercising with the only goal to shed off those excess love handles, and going green with envy about the next door girl who has abs (her social media is proof of it). I too am a victim of it, not denying. But it is these same women who preach about body positivity and Free The Belly, yet refuses to accept their own body as it is. They’re the same people who would write long Facebook posts about loving thy flab, yet refuse to post their own flab on Instagram.
I know, it’s hard. It’s hard to not associate prettiness with flat stomachs, thanks to years and years of being told that slim is beautiful.
No matter what, we will all struggle to find that ‘perfect’ tummy in the various diet trials, gym routines, and maybe starvation. We sign up for power yoga, because that’s the latest fad, in the hope to have the ideal tummy standard. We sacrifice our favourite ammade bhakshanam for a keto-rich diet only to realise that you can’t do without chapati. We wear high-waist jeans to tuck in our tummies so that it looks as though we have a flat belly. The effort, I tell you! And all for what? For something as trivial as a flat tummy.
In all this hurry-burry, we forget one thing. We forget to love ourselves.
The thing is, the moment you start appreciating your body, which you consider flawed, you tend to not care about the extra love handles. If you truly want to make an effort to lose weight without losing interest, you would have done it by now. We often go to the gym or try out a new diet for two reasons, to show the people around you that you’re losing weight and to meet unrealistic standards of beauty. However, when you do it for yourself, you will see the difference. Torturing yourself because of your insecurity is literally a dead end. One of the reasons I’ve stopped judging my body is because I’ve started to love it. It’s still a process and I haven’t reached body-loving Nirvana yet, but I know I will.
It begins by looking at your body and embracing the art of self-love.
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