Last Tuesday I went to the Love Your Body workshop to learn more about how we perceive our bodies. I think that in today’s social media age, it is really hard to to feel good about your body. We are always surrounded by advertisements and movies where everyone looks like a model and we begin to think that is the norm. In reality, those people spend hours working out and dieting. Even then, there is usually a lot of Photoshop involved to make them look like what we think is “perfect”.

This workshop taught me a lot about how food relates directly to body image. The interesting part was that even the foods that we liked had much more meaning behind them and they usually related to experiences or feelings that we have had in the past. We did one exercise where we talked about what our favorite food was when we were children and why we thought that was our favorite food. The workshop leader, Lyn Staack, mentioned how when she was a child and got to pick her birthday dinner, she picked what she thought was her favorite food. But thinking back to it now, she realized she would pick a food that she liked but also would make sure that it was a food that her sister didn’t like. It was interesting to see how much experiences in our past our feelings towards people influence what we eat now.

We also did an activity where we physically posed in a position of our favorite activity. Some people posed like they were running, or reading, or doing yoga. Doing these poses also brought on a lot of feelings for some people that made them remember what it was like to do these activities, or a time when they did these activities the most. For example, people that posed like they were running were brought back to when they did track in high school.

Overall this workshop was really interesting and I’m glad that I went!