Body image

Maybe it's the New Year effect. Maybe it's an over-abundance of thin-spiration blogs. Maybe it's the extra couple of pounds all humans put on during the cold months as a vestige of evolutionary survival techniques. Maybe it's a weariness with media culture.

Whatever the trigger, body image - particularly negative body image - has been a pervasive blog theme lately.

There was Charlotte's post (Wild things RUN free) about body image, and Balancing Jane's post about when a woman is real (or not), and Live, Love & Run's rant about diets and the "perfect" body. (Heck, even Nitmos wrote a whole post about how he feels fat right now.)

Many of us struggle with the balance between knowing what we can do (run, jump, lift, work, clean, cook, hike, read, learn, teach, write, think) and what we should look like when we're doing those things.

In case you feel like the only person alive who "doesn't look great" or "could stand to lose a few pounds," I have one word for you: Stop.

There is no perfect.

Even the people presented to us as "perfect" are not perfect. They struggle with the same (if not more insidious) issues of body image and the quest for "perfection."

Case in point... model Cameron Russell talks frankly about body image in a presentation for TED:

Concluding quote:

"If there's a takeaway from this talk, I hope it's that we all feel more comfortable acknowledging the power of image in our perceived successes and our perceived failures."

Watch and let me know what you think... I'm considering using this talk in a class about how we develop our sense of self, and what role media plays in that process.

Thoughts? Comments?