My friend, who is thin, told me that she was talking to another fat friend of hers about how trying on clothes made her feel bad about her body. Her fat friend said “When clothes don’t fit me, I think to myself ‘These clothes are not well made.’”
I say a big hell yeah to that. How often do we blame our bodies and not the clothes/situation? How often to we give credit to anything but our bodies?
We say “These jeans don’t look good on me because my ass is too big”
We say “These jeans make me look great!
Why do we blame our bodies when clothes don’t fit well, but give credit to the clothes when they do? (The subject of “flattering” clothes is a whole other blog post, as is the idea that we have “flaws” that we should hide with clothing.)
We bemoan our perceived imperfections in the mirror, but if we like the way we look we give the credit to the “skinny mirror”.
What if we’ve been sold a crock of crap by companies who make billions of dollars by convincing us that we are the problem and their products are the solution? What if our bodies are perfect and anything that doesn’t work for them is just wrong for us?
If you don’t like the way that pants look, consider that it’s not you…it’s the pants. Maybe take them off while saying to yourself – these are obviously somebody else’s pants. If you look fantastic in pants, then consider the fact that it’s you – your awesome rocking body that is making mere pants look sexy – they sure as hell didn’t look that good on the rack! If we have issues finding clothes that work for us, the problem is that people aren’t making clothes correctly for us. That’s a real problem and it does well and truly suck, but let’s be clear that the problem isn’t our bodies – it’s the clothing manufacturers.
We have the option of appreciating our bodies, forgiving the things that just aren’t good enough for those fantastic bodies, and then taking whatever action (if any) we choose to about the issues with the clothing and fashion industries, all while putting the problems where they belong, which is far away from our bodies.
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