Bodies aren't meant to stay the same. We are supposed to grow and change. We shouldn't be making people in their 30's, 40's, 50's, etc. feel like they need to strive for the bodies they had in their teens and 20's. Or making people feel like they 'need to get their bodies back' after they have had children. These mindsets aren't healthy and change is inevitable."
As I've written about before, I have to say that cancer (and to a lesser extent, simply getting older) was my own body image wake up call. Among the other things it changed in my life, cancer obliterated my decades-long obsession with losing weight. Except for during my 20s when I wore size 31 jeans, I've always been—in Sears catalog parlance—husky, and when the weight started padding on in my mid-30s, my mantra became, "If I could only lose another 20 lbs. I could…wear tank tops to pride parades, get a boyfriend, win the lottery, blah, blah, blah." (Truth be told, even when I was wearing size 31 jeans I considered myself fat.) After I came through on the other side of the cancer treatment however, for the first time in my life, none of that was important any more. I was actually comfortable in my own skin and I learned that it was so much easier to just take care of myself, eat as healthy as possible, and simply accept who I was rather than to fixate on what size jeans I had to buy.