The Measurements of Self Love

Ever since the ‘A4 Waist Challenge’ surfaced a month or so ago I’ve been thinking about how we find it so difficult to love ourselves. For anybody who doesn’t know, the ‘A4 Waist Challenge’ involved posting a picture with ones waist eclipsed by a piece of A4 paper being held shorter side to the top. Many questions spring to mind, first of all: who thought of doing this? Yes a piece of paper has various uses, but a template to measure the human body against has not previously been, and should never have become one of them.  When did we become so insecure that we had to seek validation from an object outside of ourselves? 

The more you think about it, the more it becomes clear that this isn’t really a new phenomenon: God knows how many lengthy battles have ensued with the scales, trying to get them down to that magic number. Calorie counting is a similar kind of validation which has existed for years: many a time I can be found willing myself not to snack, just to stay within the holy 2000. Revelation time: even though this might seem obvious it literally only just occurred to me writing this – 2000 calories a day is bullshit. It works out that it’s the amount of calories a moderately active adult female weighing 132 pounds would need to consume in a day to maintain her current weight. Who is this woman? Cos it ain’t me and it’s probably not you either, there are a million different circumstances that would change the calories needed: if I’m stressed, if I’m more or less than ‘moderately active’, if I’m on my period (hallo Cadbury’s), metabolism and even the kinds of foods I’m eating. At the heart of the matter is the fact that in general, we know when we need more food and we know when we don’t – we shouldn’t need these numbers to validate our feelings about food.

I don’t think anybody is innocent of uploading a picture to Facebook and waiting with eager anticipation for the likes to come rolling in. The number of likes obviously then takes its effect on our self-esteem for better or worse. Same thing with Tinder matches but this time you don’t even know these people, they just become part of a reassuring statistic.

I think in an age where we live so much outside of ourselves, throwing our image about on social media and being so constantly occupied with what everybody else is thinking, it’s hard to find time to consider how we might actually learn to love ourselves properly. Coupled with our obsession with numbers (50% chance it’ll rain today, 3 new notifications I woke up to) there really is no wonder that we’ve lost the ability to love ourselves organically from within, without seeking outside validation that can be quantified. So though it will inevitably be difficult and take a decent amount of time and effort, it’s would probably do us all a lot of good.