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Chinae Alexander Embraces Body Confidence in Her Everyday Life

“We are never going to wake up on our deathbed and wish we’d worried about our ass more.” In collaboration with MENTOR®.

Wellness
Chinae Alexander Embraces Body Confidence in Her Everyday Life
Photo: Courtesy of Chinae Alexander
As Told To
Bibi Deitz

I much prefer the term “body confidence” over “body positivity.” If we have the expectation to be positive all the time about our physical being, we can set ourselves up for shame and guilt around not having the right feelings about our body or not being perfectly positive all the time. I think it’s about acceptance, confidence, and the willingness to have more fluidity in how we think about our bodies as a whole, and that inherently allows for changing our minds.

Photo: Courtesy of Chinae Alexander

Body confidence is about really seeing yourself and being able to accept perceived flaws, but also understanding that our bodies are just one piece of a whole, confident person. I believe that body confidence and liberation promotes thinking about your body less and spending less time and energy assigning negative or positive attributes to our bodies or how we think about them.

Whether you're questioning cosmetic surgery, wanting to be more muscular, or have the desire to lose weight, the state of your body shouldn't dictate your overall confidence or love for yourself. While change is a natural part of life, your inherent value shouldn't be rooted in wanting to change things about yourself. I always tell people as long as you aren’t counting on a change to change your mind about yourself, there’s room for change in the body image discussion. Through and through, in every sense of the phrase, I think women’s bodies and the decisions they make for themselves are for her and her alone.

I can name about 100 flaws about myself that I used to see and hate. But I realized when I started to focus less on an inventory of my parts and really focus on myself as a whole person, those thoughts minimized. I have stretch marks from losing and gaining weight over the years, I have freckles from sun damage on my chest because I sat in a tanning bed in my 20s, I have a flat booty no matter the number of squats I do—but all those things pale in comparison to the overall acceptance for myself. We are not inspecting a car, we are humans and harping on “flaws” is a waste of our precious time.

The biggest thing that’s helped change my perspective on body image over the years is actually seeing representation of lots of different bodies in the media. This might be more niche, but another experience that shed light on the universality of body image struggles has been my time on set with models and people whose bodies are their living. Seeing them have insecurities and seeing them going through their own struggles with body image just reminds me that this is a universal thing—we’ve been conditioned to think poorly about ourselves. It’s not us, it’s them, and by them, I mean the culture.

Photo: Courtesy of Chinae Alexander

Over the last decade, I had a huge shift in my mindset around how silly it is overthink the size of my thighs when there are other larger issues happening in this world that can use my energy. Perspective about what is going on beyond our small, negative thinking about our looks and really seeing more of an aerial view of life has really helped give me respite from not being so hard on myself about superficial things. We are never going to wake up on our deathbed and wish we’d worried about our ass more.

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