During a conversation about body image recently, someone said, “I’m honestly not sure if I even want to accept my body.”

And I thought to myself, “Girl, me neither.” 😂

I’ve been studying, writing about, living, and teaching body acceptance for over 20 years now. But I’m not gonna lie to you. I still feel conflicted about my body. I battle with my own brain sometimes.

If I had a goal word for how I want to feel about my body, it is unbothered, but at times, I admit: I am bothered.

Nothing has necessarily gone wrong here, since I believe that body acceptance is not a one-and-done situation.

The origin story of my body acceptance journey

When I first stumbled on the idea of body acceptance, I was in my early 20s on Livejournal dot com (yes, I am old in internet years).

I found Fatshionista, which was a community full of confident, weird, stylish fat women. They dressed like artists and goths, they wore vintage. They dressed to be seen. Sometimes my mouth would hang open at what they dared to wear. I wanted that audacity when it came to my body.

I admired the leaders of that Fatshionista group. They were political, they dressed really cool, and to me, they seemed suspiciously😂 comfortable with their shape and size (a concept that seemed impossibly out of reach to me at the time).

I assumed they’d made it. That they no longer had bad body days. That they’d fully arrived at “I love my body” and were just vibing there permanently in their devastatingly cool outfits.

Young Amber was so optimistic, LOL. Now after 20 years of working on this stuff, I know better. It’s not a destination any of us can arrive at.

(shoutout Marianne Kirby & Lesley Kinzel, thanks for changing my life, nbd 🫶)

It’s easy to look at certain people and assume they’ve arrived. Society tells us a tidy little story:

Lose weight or get the “perfect” body → Never think mean thoughts about yourself again ✨ Happily ever after ✨

But you can ask anyone who’s experienced major body changes (weight loss, plastic surgery, whatever). That perfect body in their mind’s eye? Rarely shows up. Even if your body gets closer to your ideal, it doesn’t guarantee silence from the Mean Girl Soundtrack in your head. Your brain can easily find some other flaw to focus on.

Maybe we’re just all pre-programmed to see ourselves as unattractive

When I looked through the photos and videos from my recent surf retreat, I saw my belly resting on the surfboard and it didn’t look anything like what I thought it would look like in that position. 🧐

I’m not sure why I thought my stomach would look flat lying on a surfboard, because I don’t have a flat stomach at literally any other time. Then I realized it was because I’d just never seen a photo with a belly like mine lying on a surfboard before.

Same thing happened the first time I saw yoga photos of myself. This was pre-Instagram, when larger yoga teachers were far less common, and I had few images to compare myself to. Everything looked wrong to me.

But it wasn’t me that was wrong. I just wasn’t trained to see that body as a yoga body. 🧠 👀 My visual cortex had no reference point. I’d never seen a body like mine, doing that. So my brain went: “That’s different. Must be wrong.”

Well, after a couple decades of working on this, I have some bad news for you:

That shrieking programming loop that sounds like some bodies are hot and some bodies are gross, and where does yours fall on the rating scale?!?! 😱 …it doesn’t ever disappear.

We are non-consensually served thousands of body-related messages every day: from movies, ads, TV, TikTok, family, church, our classrooms, wellness influencers, even our own friends.

Which means… body acceptance is daily work.
Like recovery. Like sobriety.
It takes daily awareness. Discernment. Attention. Community.

Body image is cumulative. Which means it’s always shifting.

So to me, body acceptance can’t be about achieving a static state of accepted.

The only constant thing about our bodies is that they will change

I’ve had so many different bodies over the years. I bet you have too.

We aren’t marble statues.
Infuriatingly, we are weird, squishy, stretch-marked organisms that can’t be tamed.

One of the teachings I return to over and over again is from Michelle Cassandra Johnson. It goes: Expect and accept non-closure.

Our brains want endings. Certainty. Resolution.
​Lose the weight. Done!
Hit the PR in the gym. Stay there forever!
Accept my body. Never think mean thoughts about it again!

But that’s not how it works. The reality of having a human body is constant, unpredictable change. So being okay with my body?
That’s really about being okay with change itself.

Learning to surf means constantly adapting to changing conditions. It requires attention, flexibility, creating lots of options for success, and reorienting myself again and again.

🌊 I fall off the surfboard 1000 times. I eventually get kind of okay at surfing.

As far as my body stuff goes… one day, I’m proud of myself for never photoshopping my cellulite. The next day, I’m Googling photos of plus-size tummy tucks (don’t @ me LOL).

🫀 I practice body acceptance for 20 years. I eventually get kind of okay at accepting my body.

Loving or even tolerating my body takes effort. Especially in a world that literally profits off me hating myself, a world ready to sell me endless amounts of crap to fix the “problem” of my body.

It takes effort to be neutral. To be curious. And to accept or love these bodies.

The ones we’ve got today. And all the bodies we will ever have.