Embracing CHANGE

It's time to stop comparing your current body to your former one. Romanticising the past is easy, but we're not meant to look the same our whole lives.

- JENNA RYU

A MINDLESS SCROLL THROUGH YOUR CAMERA roll can bring about mixed emotions. You may feel joy and nostalgia when looking back on that super fun friends trip, say, or all those late-night outings from your college days. On the flip side, this stroll down memory lane can also trigger some harsh self-comparison. "Wow, look at how toned my abs were ten years ago." "My skin was so much tighter and brighter back then." "I can't believe I used to be such a fit and fast runner. What happened?"

Chances are, you don't look the same as you did 20, 10, five, or even two years ago. Maybe you had a baby within the past decade or recovered from disordered eating. Or perhaps your metabolism just doesn't work the way it did when you were a teen. Aside from major life changes, though, your body can also outgrow itself simply because that's just a natural part of getting older, says Jennifer Rollin, therapist and founder of the Eating Disorder Centre in Rockville, Maryland. "The same way we mentally mature over time, our physical body also changes as we go through pregnancy, for example, menopause, or even just plain old ageing," Rollin says. Yet most of us forget (or have trouble accepting) that it's not only normal but inevitable for our bodies to evolve.

Of course, it can be incredibly hard to embrace weight gain, say, fine lines, or other changes to your appearance in a culture that's constantly shoving a certain "ideal" look in your face. It would take real systemic change to shift that toxic messaging - which, unfortunately, isn't such a quick fix. On an individual level, however, it is possible to challenge some of those harmful ideas about how you "should" look so you can feel more comfortable in your skin.

Here, body image experts share their best advice for accepting the whole "getting older" and "looking different" process that all of us, if we're lucky, will have to navigate.