Hi there! You're listening to the Lazy Genius Podcast. I'm Kendra Dachie and I'm here to help you be a genius about the things that matter and lazy about the things that don't.

Today's episode 143. Your body is not flawed, so I got on a soapbox last week about food rules and diet culture, and today I'm going to say they're just a tiny bit longer. I have more things to say, but I want us to talk today about our bodies.

I know it's like so fun, it's not loaded at all, but I really do believe in a world where it can be fun and not loaded to talk about our bodies because our bodies are awesome.

Full disclosure, I haven't always felt this way, like not by a long shot. So I get the difficulty here. We're going to move through this together though, okay?

First thing, the thing that made me realize I had turned a corner on how I felt about my body and all bodies. It came a few months ago when I was reading a post on the Instagram account, The Birds Papaya.

Sarah, as her name, is one of the most powerful voices I have encountered around this topic, by the way. I'll put a link to her account in the show notes.

She posted a photo of herself, I think, in her underwear. We often does underwear swimsuits and showed her stretch marks and her cellulite and all the things.

It was a post about a mental turning point where she wasn't obsessed with fixing her body or even praising her body.

We often think it's like one of those two. Either we're stuck in a cycle of trying to get something smaller or something's bigger, you know, working hard to hit some arbitrary ideal of what we're supposed to look like.

Or we become obsessed with convincing ourselves that our bodies are amazing as they are and we can love both kinds of bodies the same.

Here's the subtext, though, to that second attitude and it surfaced in this Instagram post.

The turning point for Sarah was that she suddenly saw her body as neutral. She wasn't trying to change it nor was she working hard to convince herself that it was beautiful the way I was.

She was completely neutral. It was simply her body. I wish I could find the post because it was so well written, but I couldn't find it.

But I remember when I read it the first time and I scroll through the comments, someone with very excellent intentions to cheer her on in this mentality said something like, yes, love your body, flaws and all.

And when I read that, I saw red. That was a turning point for me because I realized that our bodies aren't flawed.

The subtext of the whole love your body movement, which is really great and valuable and I'm not knocking it. I mean, that's your body.

But if it doesn't have a certain shape that is inherently flawed, good for you for loving it anyway, but there is something wrong with it.

And I'm here to tell you that there is not. There really is not.

We have been told for years that a certain body shape is the standard. And if we fall short of that, well too bad.

There's movement now in realizing that it's okay to fall short, but I want to challenge that the standard we're falling short of is an arbitrary harmful standard in the first place.

Having a round stomach isn't a flaw. Having cellulite isn't a flaw. Having saggy skin, whether you've had babies or not is not a flaw.

Being apple or pear or whatever fruit magazines tell us we are is not a flaw.

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