body satisfaction and self-esteem

“Some people like to call me cocky or arrogant, but I just think, ‘How dare you assume I should think less of myself?’ “. When I first read this quote a couple of minutes ago, I was overwhelmed by its honesty and courage. I bet none of you ever thought about it that way? At least I didn’t. We live in a world in which we are forced to become better and reach our limits. We are trained to fail because what we do is never good enough – there will always be anyone better than you. Encouragement has been pushed aside in our vocabulary by a stronger and more negative marked word called “discouragement”. I wonder how on earth anyone could actually believe that sad and depressed people achieve better results than happy and joyful ones. Nonetheless, that’s the story of our lives – isn’t it?

The easiest way to keep somebody under your control is to lower his/her self-esteem in any possible way. The media knows that principle quite well and uses it whenever it gets the chance. Where do I want to go with that? I want to draw a special focus on “body satisfaction”, its relationship to “self-esteem” and why it is so hard love and accept yourself in the 21^st century.

Body satisfaction has been defined in various ways, particularly in terms of body cathexis, body image, and weight satisfaction. Body-cathexis reflects how satisfied people are with specific aspects of their bodies, body image reflects how close a person’s actual shape is to their ideal shape, and weight satisfaction reflects how close a person’s actual weight is to their ideal.

One way to define Self-esteem: it is the “level of global regard one has for the self”, or how well a person “prizes, values, approves, or likes” him or herself.

I think the connection between these two terms is quite obvious. Self-esteem mostly depends on body satisfaction because we live in a “body focused” world. You have to have a perfect body to be called beautiful; at least that’s what so many people believe. Skinny is the best. And if you can’t fit the rule, you’re out. 

I don’t know who “invented” the concept of a perfect body and why it became so important to our society. I guess that’s what we like to call “a first world problem”. Can you believe that there are so many people out there avoiding food because they are in a beauty mania, while others suffer because they simply don’t have enough to eat? Well, try to explain to a 4 year old undernourished child in Africa or Asia why you refuse to eat that piece of chocolate and prefer to throw it away. Oh I beg you please, just give it a try and explain it. Gosh, I get so mad when I think of it!!

I don’t want to give you statistics or other stuff. I just want to give you my personal opinion. Nobody will ever reach perfection. We have to accept our body. We can shape it – of course. We can try to stay healthy – well that’s amazing. But we can’t force ourselves to reach unreachable goals. It’s simply not possible. Get that in your mind. Everyone is beautiful. And that’s not just a stupid sentence with no meaning. That’s maybe the honest one in life. We have to accept us. Perfection isn’t objective. It’s a subjective decision you have to make for yourself in order to gain the amount of self-esteem you deserve. And you deserve the highest amount!