Your Weight Is Not Your Worth

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If I asked you to describe your body, what would you say? Would you tell me how tall you are? Attempt to describe your build? Reveal your weight? Describe your figure as an hourglass, ruler, pear or apple? 

Or would you tell me how fast you can run a mile? How many push-ups you can do? How it’s fighting cancer, healed from an illness or survived an assault? Would you tell me how it allowed you to whitewater raft or climb Kilimanjaro? Would you tell me how its strength allows you to carry physical and emotional burdens, how its flexibility allows you to push yourself to new limits, how its stamina allows you to accomplish more than you ever thought possible?

Would you tell me about what it looks like or would you tell me about what it can do?

I admire all of you for whom the latter is the obvious choice and encourage the rest of you to join me on the path towards appreciating our bodies for what they can do rather than for how they appear.

Most of us judge our bodies by what they look like, how they fit in jeans and what happens to our bellies when we sit down. We weigh our worth on a scale and measure our happiness in belly rolls. But what if we could change our perspective? What would it mean to live a life in which we can step off the scale not in a protest of pounds but rather because we have come to appreciate that the scale fails to weigh anything of worth at all – that all things worth measuring are measured in smiles, accomplishments, love, friends, health and happiness.

I’ll tell you. It means a life in which I go to the gym not to lose weight or look better in a bikini but because I want to be stronger and more limber both physically and mentally. Because I want to stretch my limits. Because I want a body than can support me and everything I want to do. Because I want to build my body up so that it can support me in everything I do, not because I want to whittle it down to nothingness. I will not aim to diminish myself – to be thin, slender or small, all words that imply frailty and weakness. I do not want to be frail or weak. I want to be strong. I want to be. I want to do. And I want a body that can support that.

So instead of weighing my body’s worth (literally) and measuring my body’s value in pounds, I am aiming to measure my body in accomplishments. I am going to applaud my body for what it is capable of. I am going to be thankful for my body for all that it allows me to do.

… all on the path towards loving my body just as it is.

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Alexis Wolfer is Editor-in-Chief of TheBeautyBean.com and a Real Beauty activist and ambassador. Follow her on Twitter here.

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