My son is getting married in about a month. We love his fiancĂ©e, everything is going according to plan, and I honestly don’t have much to do — except find a dress.
Which has apparently opened up a whole lot of garbage in my thoughts.
Talking about the way we feel about our bodies can get messy. My personal strategy? Looking away. And I know I’m not alone — you know what we do. When we’re trying to take that fun friend group photo, we’re all fighting to be in the back row.
I had a really interesting experience going wedding dress shopping with my soon-to-be daughter-in-law. She loved every dress she tried on. Each time she stepped out of the dressing room, she noticed — and celebrated — how “snatched” she looked. She truly loves her body. It was genuinely refreshing. (I’m already planning to interview her mom for a future episode — I want to know how she raised someone with that kind of confidence.)
So why is self-loathing such a common reaction to seeing ourselves in a mirror?
In my last episode on the Sendy Mom podcast with Kim Dodds, she opened up about losing some of her identity along with all of her hair during chemo treatments for breast cancer. Along with the other trials that came her way, she said yes to all of it. She accepted where her body was and chose to love it anyway. That kind of grace is powerful — and it’s available to all of us.
Recently, through my Better Than Happy coach training with Jody Moore, I learned some tools for working through body image — and the starting point is always acceptance.
Jody teaches that the story we tell ourselves sounds something like: I might like myself better if I were thinner, more fit. But here’s what she helped me see — this is an identity issue, not an appearance issue. Changing your appearance rarely leads to actually liking yourself more. If you want to genuinely like yourself, you have to change your thoughts about yourself.
Think about it this way: yelling at people rarely gets them to change. Shaming, ridiculing, and criticizing pushes people away — you don’t want to spend time around someone who constantly puts you down. So why do we do that to ourselves? Stop distancing yourself from yourself.
When you accept yourself where you are, give yourself compassion, and extend yourself some grace when you mess up, you’re actually in a much better position to grow and change — if and when you choose to.
Here’s the advice I’m taking into the dressing room:
Clothes come in standard sizes. Thank goodness none of us are standard. Stop shaming yourself for not fitting the “right” size. You’re not wrong. The clothes are wrong. Start treating shopping like an interview — you are interviewing the clothes. They have to audition for you. You decide if they make the cut.
Every person is a mix of beautiful, complicated, imperfect things. There’s no upside to hunting down everything that’s wrong with my body. So I’m going to start looking for where I look “snatched.”
And here’s what’s really shifting things for me: my spirit doesn’t care what body it lives in. It’s just so happy to have a body — one that can move, talk, dance, and play the piano. I catch myself looking at my hands after playing a piece of music, genuinely in awe of what they can do. Bodies are incredible, no matter what they look like.
The next time you step into a dressing room, catch your reflection, or fight for the back row in a photo — try something different. Celebrate the body you’re in. And then love it.
If this resonates with you and you’d like to do some deeper work on how you think about your body, I’d love to sit with you in a free coaching consultation. I’m in training as a life coach and I’m taking clients — no pressure, just a real conversation. Grab a spot on my calendar.
If you enjoyed this newsletter, here are a few Sendy Mom episodes to help you go even deeper:
Radical Acceptance with Miriam — A powerful conversation about accepting yourself exactly where you are.
How to Be Awesomer: Coaching Your Body and Your Mind — Ready to take this further? This one is about coaching yourself toward your full potential — mind and body together.
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