Posted by Laine

Date Posted April 14, 2008

Cardiovascular fitness, strength, flexibility, endurance, power, speed and coordination are the key to our health and freedom of choice. The key to being your own master is experimenting with what weight feels comfortable to you rather than trying primarily to be thin for acceptance.

Learning to accept and love our bodies and ourselves is an important and difficult ongoing struggle for everyone.

But to change the societal values underlying body image, we need to do more than love ourselves and move our bodies. We need to focus our attention on the forces that drive wedges between us and fight for our own freedom to choose what is beautiful.
I inhabit my body and do not allow another to tell me how to live in it. There must be a balance, which I must find. The journey is my own and I must carve out my own path like a true warrior.

I have learned this balance is a constant maneuvering and shifting, not only in the movement of my physical body, but in maintaining my direction into womanhood and working emotionally and intellectually towards evolution.

The enjoyment of a guilt-free chocolate session with the discipline of to run up any mountain with the children I wish to have ? this is a balance I must constantly strive towards.

To truly create change, to create a world in which we can all make informed choices about our appearances for ourselves and not be dictated to by an industry, is to incorporate all men and women into the heart of how we see ourselves.
From this expanded horizon of humanity we may begin to value the lives of other men and women who previously meant nothing to us. We may begin to realize that understanding their lives is essential to understanding our own lives and realizing our full potential as people.

If we can begin to eliminate the hatred and ridicule levied against people who don't fit the conventional ideal, we can lessen the stress of not fitting in. We can begin to create our own movement, with the aim of building a world where each of us can celebrate and delight in our individual unique physical bodies as an expression of our hearts.
We can begin pushing against the imposed boundaries of what we are taught is beautiful and dance to our own beat. We can begin to take control of our lives and live what is really important to our.

We need each others' help to change the deeply entrenched attitudes that make us dislike our own bodies and looks. We need to learn again to be grateful to the magnificent machine we inhabit and explore its true potential.

We must take the courage to say no to diets, saline and silicone, no to cutting, spritzing, waxing and sucking in an attempt to look less like ourselves and more like a number on the scale, an ideal.

This is nothing more than chasing an illusion, and it interferes with our relationships with other humans, keeping us from true intimacy, reinforcing our fears that we aren?t good enough, pretty enough, clever enough, or strong enough.

We no longer have to buy into this lie, THIS IS NOT THE TRUTH! Let?s take the courage to work on the inside and outside of us because?Beauty is the WHOLE of you.