Words by Liz Reichard // Photo by Ayla Meinberg
The way you feel about your body at the moment is not your fault.
It’s a tool of the patriarchy to keep women suppressed because by making us obsessed with how we look, we don’t have space to think about much else.
Women’s rights are being eroded across the world.
Since the Taliban has come back into power in Afghanistan, women’s rights have been reduced to such a way that they are completely isolated and separated from each other. In Iraq, they passed laws that means in practice, families can effectively bypass age restrictions on child marriage.
In the US, since the election of their current president, women’s rights have been reduced and wound back. The so-called “Leader of the Free World” wants to dictate what women can do with their bodies and to strip them of the right to choose the healthcare that’s best for them, and I quote, “whether they like it or not”.
And there’s rumblings of this stuff happening here in Australia too. In Orange Public Hospital NSW, in late 2024 it was revealed that they had issued a directive to staff to not provide information about abortion to patients unless there were medical complications during the pregnancy. Around the same time, Queanbeyan Public Hospital, also NSW, suspended all surgical abortions, even in medically required cases.
This is healthcare that is legal in this country, and yet we have public hospitals who are trying to limit women’s access to it. Nevermind the fact that if you’re a woman who lives in a rural area, it’s going to be hard for you to access that healthcare as it is not available in many country areas.
It’s not just healthcare that’s being impacted. In 2024, 101 women lost their lives due to acts of violence, predominantly at the hands of men. And so far this year, 48 women have also lost their lives to acts of violence, also mainly from men.
Women are overwhelmingly not respected on this planet. We continue to be treated as property instead of individual humans who can make their own decisions – including being able to say NO and have it respected.
As a collective, more than ever, we need to focus on what’s important, and I’m here to tell you, it’s not the size of your arse in your jeans or your arms in a tank top or your gray hair or your wrinkles.
We have been conditioned for generations that our worth comes from what we look like. There are billion dollar industries that continue to push this agenda because that’s how they became billion dollar industries. They feed off the insecurities they gave you: in ads, magazines, movies and TV shows. The ones that live rent-free in your head that if you’re not young, white and thin you’re not “right”. It’s all bullshit and this conditioning is not your truth.
When you were a baby, you loved your body. The day you found out you had toes was the best day of your life. You didn’t care about the size of your body or the size of your toes, you just felt they were awesome. And they wiggle! Yay! And I can shove them in my mouth! Double yay!
As you grew you started to get told stories about what your body “should” look like. How old were you the first time someone commented negatively on your body? I was 8.
I invite you to think about what you could think about instead, if you stopped thinking about what you look like, how much you ate and how much exercise you did in a day? What could you do with all that brain power if those topics suddenly just weren’t popping up anymore with alarming regularity?
My dream, my wish for you, is to practice body neutrality. Body neutrality is when you’re able to look at your body without any negative thoughts or any positive ones, literally just “this is my body, and this is what it looks like”. A pure, simple acceptance of your body with no negatives, no positives.
I see body neutrality as being at the midpoint of a scale where body hate is on one end and body love is at the other. Getting to that point alone will change your life dramatically, but by all means, once you get to that point, you can keep going towards body love.
Each and every one of us needs to make the conscious decision, the radical outrageous decision that our body is perfectly acceptable as she is right now. Not when you lose five kilos, not when you tighten up your belly, or any other beauty ideal that is living rent-free in your head.
You are a woman, a glorious being full of life and ideas and love and fun and adventure and pleasure! Your body is the least interesting thing about you!
A huge step in the right direction is to start thinking about your body as a tool rather than an ornament. She is the tool for you to live this one glorious life you’ve been given, and she is the one thing in your life that is truly, wholly yours. Your home. You deserve to feel safe in your home.
This body that you’ve got right now is the only body you are going to get in this lifetime. And all that you can do is because you have this body, and sometimes we forget to appreciate her for all that we can do because we have her.
If you’re ready to rewrite your relationship with your body, please join me for my Outrageous Radical Body Acceptance group program starting on Monday 29 September 2025.
