Who loves their body?
9 out of 10 women don’t.
But Michelle Elman isn’t one of them. She’s a body confidence coach, TEDx speaker, and author of the #1 Amazon bestseller Am I Ugly? One Woman’s Journey to Body Positivity.
She will set you on fire with her passion for body positivity.
You’ll learn why no one has the right to shame, judge, or blame you for your body—regardless of its size.
You’ll also discover what it takes to finally be happy with your body … making you one of those 1 in 10 women who couldn’t care less what other people think.
Learn more about Michelle’s work
What You’ll Learn
No matter what size you are, no matter what your body looks like, you can have body confidence issues.”
When you hate your body, your first reaction is to pick out all the bits and pieces you don’t like. Maybe the problem is your thighs, or your wrinkles, or your tummy.
But your body isn’t the problem. Your mindset is.
Your body is who you are. Aging or gaining weight won’t change that. You’re still you, no matter what your size. “I’d rather build my self-esteem and my worth from a more reliable source,” Michelle says, “which is from inside of me.”
Body confidence is unrelated to how you look, she explains, so it’s time to start smiling at that body of yours in the mirror, loving it, and using it to do all those things you’ve held back from.
She’s seen so many women use their appearance as an excuse to not try something they really want to try, whether it be dancing or wearing a bikini.
What we look like—whether it’s the fat thing or cellulite or stretch marks or whatever it is—has just become this excuse to not get on with doing what you want to do.”
Don’t wait until you lose the weight. Get on with your life today! “There will always be a reason why society doesn’t find you beautiful,” Michelle says, “but actually being ‘ugly’ doesn’t prevent you from doing anything.”
In fact, equating your self-esteem and your worth with thinness is dangerous.
“If weight loss was the solution,” Michelle argues, “then all skinny people should have confidence and all fat people should be insecure. The body positive community proves that’s just not true.”
She adds, “Our beauty doesn’t define who we are and what we’re capable of.”
We have to start working with our own belief systems around what it means to be ‘fat’ or ‘thin’ and what assumptions or stereotypes you make about a person based on their appearance.”
When we treat others differently based on how they look, we’re perpetuating the problem.
“People who aren’t seen as beautiful by society are oppressed and marginalized, whether it’s because you have a disability or you’re fat,” Michelle says. “So it’s not you that’s the problem. It’s not your body that needs fixing. It’s society that needs fixing.”
Body shamers act as if they have the right to make judgments about your health (not to mention your competence) based on your appearance.
“People assume that, because you’re skinny, you’re healthy, and when you’re fat, that you’re unhealthy,” Michelle says. But you can be healthy at any size.
To shift this, the body confidence community is working towards “a space in which all bodies are seen as equal, so that we can actually start judging people on their performance and not what they look like.”
But it all starts with you.
When you look at yourself in the mirror, you may not like what you see. But that isn’t the truth of you. How you see yourself is shaped by your past experiences and beliefs.
“We all have these warped perceptions of ourselves,” Michelle says. She adds:
If you change your mind, you change what you see.”
Don’t miss Michelle’s heartbreaking TEDx talk about her own journey towards body positivity.
You also won’t want to miss her bestselling memoir, Am I Ugly? One Woman’s Journey to Body Positivity, out now.
Jump to Topics of Interest
03:48 Start living, stop making excuses
05:27 Prejudice against people who aren’t seen as beautiful
06:41 Body shaming is everywhere, particularly in the assumption that overweight people are unhealthy
09:56 Body confidence can be hard at any size
11:22 How we see ourselves in the mirror
13:59 The danger of equating worth with thinness
15:19 Body confidence building tips
19:38 Michelle’s “Scarred Not Scared” campaign
About Michelle Elman
Michelle is a body confidence coach, author, and TEDx speaker with a degree in psychology and 5 board certifications in NLP and hypnotherapy. But you might best know her as the voice of “Scarred Not Scared,” a social media campaign that aims to open up the conversation about surgery scars. Learn more about Michelle.
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