Here's why you don't need to get your body 'bikini ready' this summer
8 July 2021, 11:43 | Updated: 8 July 2021, 11:58
Psychotherapist Janette Marsac has revealed her tips for ditching the idea of a 'Bikini Body' for good this year.
After a tough year, we’re all desperate to feel the sun on our skin this summer.
But with ‘bikini season’ well underway, more women are feeling pressure to look a certain way in their swimwear.
Luckily, 2021 is a better time than ever to put a stop to these unrealistic beauty standards and truly enjoy the warm weather just the way we are.
- Molly Forbes' top tips to help parents raise their kids with positive body image
- Hotel expert says you should get rid of your fitted sheet for a better night's sleep
So we caught up with Psychotherapist and Registered Dietitian-Nutritionist Janette Marsac, 35, about why we should all be ditching the concept of the ‘bikini body’.
“Coming out of a pandemic, we’re realising these bodies kept us alive during a deadly time and they’re capable of so much more than just looking a certain way,” she told us.
She went on: “They’re capable of running and jumping, so when we say ‘let’s do what we can to look a certain way’, we lose all the other aspects of life.”
Janette works at ‘Forward in Heels’ which is an online therapy exclusively for women experiencing emotional pain, anxiety and depression around food and their bodies.
Opening up about social media, Janette explained how Instagram can negatively influence how we feel about ourselves.
“We don’t think about how much it takes for someone to look like the person in the photo,” she told us.
“It’s their job to look that way, if you’re a fitness model or bikini model it’s literally your job to train with professionals and look a certain way.”
She added: “There’s also the average individuals who are really good at photoshop or angles.
“So we’re getting this snippet of time of what someone looks like and it’s really not day to day.”
Janette went on to give some practical advice about how we can all make small steps to feel better about ourselves, including diversifying what we look at on social media.
“For some people, if they are following models or people that look a certain way, they’re getting this subconscious habit of ‘this is what every body should look like’ and then they’re comparing themselves to that," she said.
“By changing which accounts we look at and limiting how much time we spend on social media, we can normalise what the average body looks like.”
