Progress Not Perfection

I lie flat down on an exercise mat in the middle of LA Fitness, with my arms sprawled carelessly at my sides.  My body is covered with a thin layer of sweat and my chest rises and falls rhythmically as I take deep breaths trying to bring my heart rate down.  I squeeze my legs tightly into my chest, giving myself a mini hug, wrapping my arms around my shins.  I then begin rocking up and down, massaging my spine against the mat until I’ve built up enough momentum to thrust myself up into a seated position and begin my post-exercise stretching routine.

To my right is a tall, thin girl wearing a pair of tight, black leggings paired with an orange tank top with a built in sports bra.  A thick layer of sweat mats strands of her long, red hair against her forehead and she uses a small pink exercise towel to pat away the sweat from her eyes.  Her sunken-in cheeks are pink and she has large black circles under her eyes.  She turns away from me and her scapula protrudes from her back as she lifts her bony shoulders over her head before leaning over into a forward bend.  As I count all twelve of her ribs, which are alarmingly visible through her tank top, a wave of sadness overwhelms me.

I wonder to myself about this girl’s life.  Does she have an eating disorder or am I just making an assumption?  My thoughts shift to eating disorders in general.  What drives people to starve themselves?  Is it a genetic disposition—an aspect of someone’s personality simply waiting to be triggered to come out?  Or is it societal—the result of the millions of images bombarding young women (and men) telling them that they are not thin, or muscular, or pretty enough?  It’s probably a combination of both.

A recent print ad for Equinox- a high end fitness club

Those images are everywhere.  Everywhere that we look—magazines, television, film, the Internet—there are pictures of women that are the so-called “ideal.”  They’re usually tall and slender and possess little to no muscle tone.  Their figures are probably the result of genetics or a remarkably strict fitness and nutrition plan.  But that doesn’t matter to the young girls who want to look like that.  On top of that, many of the images aren’t even authentic.  They’ve been heavilyphoto-shopped to make the subject look as “perfect” as possible.  We are set up for failure. 

My focus returns to the tall, thin girl with long, red hair and a thought comes to me.  What if we all stopped striving for an ideal?  What if we stopped focusing on what we aren’t and started loving our bodies for what they are?  As cliché as it may sound, life is about the journey, not the end result.  If we (and this includes everyone, not just people with disordered thoughts or eating patterns) stopped picking apart our bodies and criticizing minor aspects of ourselves that we can’t change, we would all be happier people.  After all, you could probably ask any model and they’d tell you that thin does not equal happy.