There is absolutely nothing wrong with you. God made you perfectly imperfect in His image. I know ow hard that is to grasp. All around you, people make comments about their body and other’s, dieting, self-hatred, and just in general tearing themselves down. While it may be the norm to talk negatively about your body, I challenge you to find the positives. This is your home and will be for your entire life. Treating it kindly is essential. Do not get distracted by the world of thin-ideal, diet culture, and discontentment with self. Every moment you spend dwelling on it is getting you closer to self-destructive patterns I truly pray you can avoid. Thin is not everything. You can be thin and get all the compliments in the world but be absolutely miserable. Diet culture is trying to tell you that you will always need fixing. If you only lose X pounds, follow this plan, or get fit, you’ll have everything and (not) a bag of chips. The closer you get to the thin ideal and your goal weight/size, the closer you will be to dying. Wasting away physically, like you wish for, cannot come without also becoming a shell of who you once were. Nothing will make that worth it. Instead, I challenge you to accept and appreciate your body. Loving it is very difficult in our culture, so that isn’t truly realistic yet. That’s okay! When you work hard to accept and appreciate your body, it will lead to treating it kindly and, one day, hopefully, beginning to love it as is. This is all probably hard to imagine or accept right now. I know how caught up you are in the thin ideal, diet culture, and what you’ll learn are ED thoughts and behaviors. Right now, you still have the control and that gives me hope. You can pull yourself out of this. Trust in your supports and believe God’s promises are true. He doesn’t make anything other than beautiful in His eyes. I’m rooting for you!

Love, Emily

This letter was last week’s assignment for a special group I’ve attended called The Body Project. Tonight was the last night and I’ve absolutely loved it. It’s helped me to think more about how our culture influences us, but more importantly what I can do to help change it. Also, my old therapist S led it so that’s a huge plus ❤ I think that every single woman and girl out there would benefit from this group so they can replace lies with truth and begin to fight back against these beliefs