If someone asked you what you love about your body, you might pause for a minute then list maybe one or two things. But if you were asked what you hate about your body, you’d be able to name numerous things, right?
One woman asked the former question, in a new documentary she is making, and got some surprising results. Taryn Brumfitt is an Australian mother, and body image afficionado, and she is bringing her experience in a new feature length documentary called ‘Embrace’. It chronicles her own journey of self-loathing and not appreciating her body and tearing it apart mentally, to being a warrior for other women everywhere.
The idea from the film was sparked after she decided to get out of her own insecurity cage and do something bold publicly. She posted a “before and after” photo of herself online in 2013, except the “before” was her during a body building contest, and the “after” was minus the tan, and a few additional pounds.
People were so shocked that the images weren’t the other way round, as we are so accustomed to seeing in the media. For this reason she wanted to use this social media experiment and her own body-love journey to send a powerful message to women out there struggling with the same things she went through. That picture was posted after she had been debating getting a boob job and tummy tuck, but had an epiphany and decided not to go ahead with either.
“It’s taken a lot of effort, time and energy but I can tell you there is nothing better than a.) loving your body wholeheartedly, lumps and bumps and all and b.) telling society where they can shove their ideals of beauty,” she wrote in a blog post for the Huffington Post.
The Adelaide native interviewed 100 women and asked them to describe their bodies in one word. She heard “wobbly”, “disgusting”, “imperfect”, “stumpy”, and “frumpy” to name a few. It blew her away that women generally have such a negative view of their bodies.
She is on a mission to convince every woman to love her body as it is, to stop buying into corporate messages about beauty, and to change the vocabulary listed above for good.
Aside from the ‘Embrace’ documentary, Taryn is also a blogger and started a project called the Body Image Movement where she shares stories, photos, inspirational messages, and encourages other women to love themselves and find their true beauty from the inside out.
“Women are always being told to change or be different — lose weight, fight aging, smooth your skin, get rid of cellulite, I mean really, women are such amazing and dynamic creatures can we please change the conversation from this bullsh*t to something with a little more substance?” she told Huffpost Women.
“Excessive photoshopping, the sexualisation of women in the media and advertising campaigns that prey on women’s insecurities – it’s no wonder there is a culture of body loathing and body shaming of epidemic proportions going on in the world,” she writes on her Kickstarter campaign page where she is raising money to make the docu.
“My body has been ripped, slow, fast, with child, hated, treasured and punished. The day I learned to unconditionally love my body was the day I became unstoppable,” says Taryn.
Taryn is digging into a conversation that is extremely important right now. We are living in a hyper-sexualized, hyper-digitalized age where women are bombarded with unrealistic notions of beauty from a very young age. We can’t escape the imagery, and we can either fight it or give in and live with low self-esteem.
Most of us HAVE been living with low self-esteem for a long time, but Taryn is encouraging us all to break out of that destructive mindset and harness the real power we have within us. Beauty is not a trend that is set by an industry bent on profiting off a woman’s body. Beauty is not something that can be taught or dictated to us. It already exists within each of us, we just have to use the right tools to recognize how our individual notion of beauty will manifest in our lives.
One of those tools is this enlightening documentary ‘Embrace’ which we hope will inspire young women and girls everywhere that your body is not a commodity. It is something precious, valuable an unique to you. Don’t let anyone take that away by forcing you to change and manipulate it into looking like someone else’s ideals.
Taryn plans to release the film in July 2015, and use the money raised to travel around the world to interview other women who are Body Image heroes in their community, such as photographer Jade Beall. Take a look at the trailer below and see the incredible work Taryn is already doing.
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