Affirmations for body positivity
And I said to my body, softly, ‘I want to be your friend,’ it took a long breath and replied, ‘I have been waiting my whole life for this.’ —Nayyirah Waheed
👥 Serves: 1 person
🎚 Difficulty: Medium
⏳ Total time: 11-30 minutes
🥣 Ingredients: A quiet place with no distractions, a comfortable outfit
🤓 Wholebeing Domains: Awareness, Liberatory Learning, Positive Emotion, Ritualising
💪 Wholebeing Skills: Acceptance, Affirmation, Body positivity, Embodiment, Gratitude, Liberation, Non-judgement, Optimism, Refuge
Affirmations for body positivity
📝 Description
Create personalised body positivity affirmations to help ignite your body acceptance journey.
The thing is, often without even realising it, we hold biases, suggestions, notions, and concepts from influences around us of how our body “should” look. Everywhere we look we are bombarded with “ideals” that one can always be thinner, stronger, taller, curvier… sigh, it’s exhausting.
When you strip everything away, the idea of body positivity suggests real: real bodies held by real people with complicated lives without any constraint due to one’s race, gender, size, age, or ability. It can be a bold act of rebellion to fall head over heels with your body. It’s high time we recognise our value is not based on our looks. It is certainly easier said than done, but affirmations are a great place to start on a body-positive journey. Affirmations are sentences, ideas, and/or quotes you can repeat to yourself. Affirmations hold power. So much so, that if used enough, they can help transform your subconscious thoughts and reframe them from negative self-talk to positive. If you find body positivity overwhelming, try out our recipe “Practising body neutrality”.
This recipe has been created by our wellbeing content writer collaborator Marissa Del Mistro.
👣 Steps
Step 1 – Reflection (5’)
Get yourself into an outfit that speaks to you – is this something comfortable, something bright, or something a little fancy? Whatever it is, wear it and find somewhere quiet. Sit with yourself and call on yourself to reflect on what is the most common negative self-talk that you experience the most often and loudest? What does it always pick on? Why?
Step 2 – Self-assessment (5’)
After reflecting on what your loudest self-talk is, question yourself: does this make me feel fabulous, or is it negative and make me feel low and less than?
Step 3 – Creative reframing (15’)
If your answer is that it makes you feel low, or makes you doubt yourself, and is focussed on your “flaws,” – work on reframing the negative into the positive. If the negative self-talk is, for example, “I don’t like how large my thighs are,” try reframing this into a positive, for example: “My legs are strong and important because they allow me to explore my neighbourhood and/or lift my children.”
Another example could be, “I will be more appealing when I lose 10 more pounds,” which would be “I will find a partner who loves and accepts all parts of me, my value and attractiveness are not based on my weight.”
Other body-positive affirmations examples:
- “Respecting my body and feeding it well is the ultimate form of self-care.”
- “I am thankful for my strength.”
- “I love that my arms can hug my loved ones.”
- “I love _________ about my body because it makes me special and who I am.”
Step 4 – Affirmations (5’ daily!)
Repeat your personalised body positive affirmations at a time that works for you – maybe first thing in the morning? Or before wrapping up your day in the evening? Mirror work is a solid option, where you can say it to yourself while smiling, striving to energise yourself and your overall mood.