I'M DEBBIE SAROUFIM, BODY ACCEPTANCE COACH
AND I ASSURE YOU, YOUR BODY IS NOT INDICATIVE OFÂ YOUR VALUE OR WORTH.
I always thought I was supposed to love my body. And for the longest time, I thought that meant I had to “fix” it, to turn it into the smallest version it could be.Â
Now I realize that my body is not indicative of my value as a human. And that loving it can even look like hating parts of it.Â
From a young age, I was terrified of having a bad body. My mother, with the best intentions - but a very specific idea of what a good body is, wanted so badly for me to be happy with my body that she put me on a diet - when I was in the first grade.
Throughout school, I was always picked last for PE. So I never asked to sign up for sports. I never thought anything physical could be fun. My relationship with exercise only started as something to do to lose weight. It began as a punishment, not a reward. During my teens I hated my body.Â
When I was 16, I went on a family trip to Italy. We were in the country that I now regard as having the best food in the world, and lugged around a suitcase of Nutrisystem food (remember those commercials??!!). Instead of housemade pappardelle, I was eating diet pasta out of a can. My mom “envied my willpower.” At some point, her body issues became my own. At 16 years old I hated my body.Â
In college, I had a meltdown in a Macy’s dressing room. I was trying on pants over the holidays. I freaked out, believing that my thighs were too big and decided I needed liposuction. I begged my parents to pay for the surgery. Shockingly, and without hesitation, they happily obliged and it was scheduled for over spring break. At 18 I hated my body before liposuction, and at 19 I hated my body after liposuction.Â
So this story doesn’t have a Hollywood ending. I continued hating my body into my twenties, and even into my thirties. I kept thinking that if I could just do life “right” my body would comply. And so as I worked on one “flaw” I noticed another.
Our culture moralizes health, perpetuates the myth that “health” looks a specific way, and sets us up to forever judge ourselves and others accordingly. Sadly, our culture does marginalize certain body types. But the good news, (at least there is some good news) is that I no longer believe that my body tells the world anything about me.
The first step to healing was identifying the body bias and diet culture that lived within me. And then, I learned how to hold that space for that part of me with compassion, while I built up my immunity to the world we all live in.Â
Over time, I stopped blaming my mother, and realized that she, too, was a product of such a broken, image-driven culture. Sadly, she was trying to teach me to love myself, but didn’t know how to love herself. I wanted this cycle to stop with me.
I teach women, teens, and tweens to understand why body image has nothing to do with how their body looks. I empower women to identify where they’re getting caught up in the diet-cultural traps our society burdens us with, and support them in finding true body liberation and freedom, regardless of size. I believe that this self-hate, body shaming cycle can stop with us, so that future generations can really know that their body was never the problem.Â
