Loving yourself includes loving your body
I drive to the Korean day spa north of Seattle on my birthday each year. In a robe and shower cap I rotate through heated mud and salt rooms, a tea house and reading room. Alongside a few dozen other women, I wear nothing but a shower cap in the room with soaking tubs and cold plunge. Here, at a central basin I fill a noodle-sized bowl with Mugwort, a perennial Asian herb you can cook with, steep, or drench yourself in. I pour the warm infused water over one shoulder, then the other.
This is the room where I first realized that bodies of every age and weight are uniquely beautiful. I realized this in my thirties, about every woman’s body, except my own.
I grew up in a Christian home, but Sunday school lessons of Jesus’ love did not apply to loving the body. I’d sit around the kitchen table with the women in my family while they traded secrets: sliced lemon in water cuts the cravings for soda; chocolate Slim Fast tastes the most like a milkshake. The same mentality has followed me well into adulthood. In recent years, cleanses and detoxes have become a way to for me to lose weight without using the word diet, which in broader culture has increasingly felt like a dirty word. I say this as a person with a normal BMI that does not present as especially thin or fat.
As a kid, I learned to judge my body in spite of what I know to be facts: There is no intrinsic or moral good or bad when it comes to food. God created food to be enjoyed. But as Jessica Knoll deconstructed in last year’s widely read New York Times oped, wellness and “clean” eating are big business. We’re culturally wired to want the optimum version of ourselves, and we’re buying into the market of wellness, which is really the diet industry in disguise. Instead of striving to become an idealized version of ourselves with longer legs and toned abs, the Bible tells us a different story that can free us to honor our bodies the way they have been made.
Loving yourself includes loving your body
If I pray God would create a clean heart and renew my mind but secretly feel shame about my body, I miss the invitation for wholehearted acceptance of who I am in Christ. 1 Corinthians 6:19-20 tells us to glorify God with our bodies because they are temples of the Holy Spirit. In church youth group we’re often taught about God’s creation, making mistakes, and friendship. We should do a better job of teaching kids that being fearfully and wonderfully made extends past the womb and into everyday life, in how we care for other people and understand our mental and physical health.
You can’t despise your body and love your neighbor
Jesus’ greatest call is to love God, then to love our neighbors as ourselves. Am I making space to show love to my neighbor when I’m in a shame spiral after a second helping of spaghetti and meatballs? Am I thinking of my neighbor, who probably wouldn’t spend money on the luxurious shopping list of alt milks and weird nut butters I budget for when I jump into the next cleanse, all under the guise that I’ll have more to give if I can take a few pounds off my already average-sized body? Like having more money, weighing less is never enough.
The Holy Spirit wants to renew all of us, including our bodies
We are embodied, which means we are total beings, both spiritual and physical. Rather than focusing on what we want to change, we are given an invitation to receive whatever it is we find to be imperfect about our body.
What if the parts of ourselves we perceive to be imperfections are gentle reminders that God is our redeemer, and Christ can use all of us, body and mind, to point to our humanity?
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My daughter is seven. As she grows, she will see models with different-sized bodies on clothing websites and larger mannequins at the mall. Because culture is changing, I believe she will be have the chance to be much more tender towards herself. I want her to see messages of bodily acceptance mirrored in Christian community, not just on health blogs and Instagram. I also want my daughter to see me model body acceptance.
Recently, she was in the room when I was getting dressed for work. I pointed to my stomach, stretched and changed after pregnancy, and told her this is where God grew her in my womb. It has done good work. These legs have held you and pushed you in a stroller, and they are strong. This body, as it is, has nursed you, these arms hold you, and they are open.
The more I speak highly of my given body, the more I experience a slow shift in the way I think about myself. I’m learning to not reward myself or deny myself with food. The more I disconnect my plate from my emotions, eat when my body tells me it’s hungry and stop when I’m full, the more I mirror Christ’s call to honor my body. To love my body a little more like Christ does, and to receive God’s perfect love that completes me.
Teresa of Avila famously said, “Yours are the hands, yours are the feet, yours are the eyes, you are his body. Christ has no body now on earth but yours.” If we love Christ, we love our body. And if we love our body, we are called to tend to it and to love it the way it is at this very moment. After the weekend carb load. Instead of the next cleanse. In spite of the double scoop.
Practically, I think this means eating intuitively and with intention. Not limiting, restricting, or rewarding ourselves with food. And looking forward to what’s ahead.
Isaiah 25:6 takes us to the ultimate dinner party, where God “will prepare a feast of rich food for all peoples, a banquet of aged wine — the best of meats and the finest of wines.” The table is long enough for all of us, in all of our God-given shapes and sizes. I don’t know about you, but I can’t wait to pull up a chair.