Learning to Love Your Body with Naomi Finkelstein

“When I started to be kinder to myself, I noticed that I stopped being as critical of other people too, and vice versa,” shares Naomi Finkelstein. Naomi is a large-bodied yoga therapist, health and wellbeing coach, and licensed Be Body Positive facilitator. She has been a yoga teacher since 2009 and began coaching in 2019 when she noticed that the health and wellness space did not tend to cater to larger people. Naomi struggled with her body image her entire life and found self-love difficult when there was so much external pressure being put on her to lose weight. As an adult Naomi found the messages of the body positivity movement and finally realized that all those mean beliefs she had about herself were lies. Her value as a person and worthiness of love was not actually connected to her weight or size, yet those are the beliefs that were ingrained into her from such a young age. 

 

Our society is historically terrible in the way it treats and represents fat people. The diet and beauty industry actively benefit from equating health, self-worth, and beauty with size. There is nothing inherently wrong with you for simply existing in a larger body. Body positivity provides the space for people who look different from society’s ideals to learn to love themselves not only in spite of their differences, but in many cases because of their differences. It can be challenging to confront the lies about body image that have been ingrained into you since childhood but the work is worth the effort. YOU are worth the effort. Some ways to start recognizing the beauty in our differences is to begin following more diverse people on your social media feeds and to spend more time in nature.

 

You are worthy of self-love and self-confidence regardless of the size of your body. Body positivity can help you to reclaim the narrative surrounding your body image and health, so that you can feel happy and confident in your own skin. Tune into Why Didn’t They Tell Us for a conversation with Naomi Finkelstein about how you can learn to love your body and stop believing the lies that our fatphobic society has ingrained in you.

 

Quotes:

• “So much of health and wellness is centered around helping people lose weight, and that is not the best way to pursue health and wellness, in my opinion. In fact, I believe that it causes a lot more harm than it actually helps.” (2:45-3:00 | Naomi)

• “I don't think people realize how their nervous systems are damaged due to this obsession with body and food.” (28:05-28:15 | Naomi)

• “It is imperative that everybody understand that we are all at war with our bodies, because we have bias against fat people.” (28:35-28:46 | Naomi) 

• “People who consider themselves to be social justice oriented miss the mark. They don't really acknowledge fat as a social justice issue, but it is and it is inextricably linked from racism as well.” (31:49-32:03 | Naomi)

• “The more diversity we expose ourselves to, the more we're going to start to see beauty in places that we might not have seen it before.” (33:38-33:48 | Naomi)

• “When I started to be kinder to myself, I noticed that I stopped being as critical of other people too, and vice versa.” (34:00-34:09 | Naomi)

Connect with Naomi Finkelstein:  

Website: http://www.naomifinkelstein.com 

IG: @well_rounded.wellness

Connect With Leslie:

https://www.confidencecoachforgirls.com/ 

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