Julie Luongo

Tomorrow is Love Your Body Day. This is something the NOW Foundation came up with to battle the Madonna-Whore mentality of our Hollywood saturated nation. This is one of the subjects I play with in The Hard Way, so despite my tendency to make light of, well, everything, I have to admit I do care about this.

I confess. I am a former body-criticizer. I wasn’t exactly a hater. I did like my body in lots of ways. But I talked about its so-called flaws ever since I was indoctrinated to do so.

Some years ago I moved in with Julie P, a hilarious and sincere person who is an absolute force of nature. She loves people, laughs at the world, and is genius smart. She is also a beautiful person inside and out with a cute body that’s never climbed a gym’s stairmaster but has run up and down plenty of stairs in the stiletto boots that she wears because they’re in style, she likes them, and she’s a shortie. (What I’m saying is that she’s not a fierce intellectual who eschews fashion, nor is she a model-tall-and-thin slave to her body.)

Julie P was truly appalled at my negative body talk. She stopped me whenever I did it and replaced my knee-jerk negative response with a positive one. She did it in a nice way, such as, “You have a beautiful body. I think that __ (fill in the blank) is attractive.” She was never negative, such as, “What, are you crazy? What’s wrong with you? I wish I had that __ (fill in the blank).”

And that was all it took. Well, I’m sure it seemed like a lot of work for her. But for me, a few months of friendly reminders to reverse a pattern that took years to develop seemed like an instant miracle.

Of course, it helped that Julie P was absolutely right. I had no cause to criticize my body. It had done nothing wrong. The fact that it didn’t look like anyone else’s made it all the better. I love thinking I’m unique.

Reasons for negative body images for both women and men are as as vast as the bodies themselves – hence, the damage control methods are equally varied, I suppose. But I’ll tell you something that also made a difference to me. Now, I’m the last person to jump on the PC bandwagon when it comes to sanitizing language or censoring anyone in any way for that matter. But growing up, I never really liked the words used to describe my body. They were all too sexual for my teenaged humility. Voluptuous. Curvy. Stacked. Brick House. Super Freak.*

So, I’ll tell you that it helped that the opposite of “thin” changed from either “fat” or “curvaceous” to “thick.” It’s not so loaded. Some people will disagree with me on that one, but I like it.

I didn’t think much of the change in my body image. After the shift, I did start to notice that lots of people spoke badly about their bodies and mine for that matter. But the criticisms of my body didn’t bother me anymore. This didn’t strike me as revolutionary though.

However, not too long ago, I took an online test to rate how satisfied I was with my life. (Yeah, I don’t have enough to do.) It had family, friends, career, money, health categories. My body image rated so high that the test was triggered to open a page that asked me to share the secret of my success in this area. I assumed the test had made a mistake; I didn’t offer any suggestions. But in retrospect I see it wasn’t a mistake. And that’s when it really sunk in that I’d turned a corner. However, I suppose it wouldn’t have been very helpful to suggest that people live with Julie P. for 3 years. (Thanks, Jul.)

What I will suggest to anyone who hates and berates is to take tomorrow and just love the equipment. And whenever you start hating on it, tell yourself, kindly, what Julie P told me. “You have a beautiful body.”

(*A boy on the bus really did call me Super Freak once. I didn’t want to be the girl you don’t take home to mother. I liked home cooked meals, dammit. Oh, and I used the Jessica Rabbit picture, not because I think I look like that, but because she said, “I’m not bad, I’m just drawn that way.” Amen, Jessica.)