Fighting The Stories in our Heads: A Series on Body Image

From the Women of the Morning Chalk Up
Photo Credit: Molly Blackbird | @molly_blackbird

Start CrossFit and your perspective changes. Suddenly your focus shifts to what your body can do rather than what it looks like. Suddenly you have muscles you love. A body you love.

That story gets told a lot.

But it’s not the real story for many, maybe even most, women.

The real story is far less elegant. Yes, CrossFit changes our perspective. Yes, CrossFit helps us embrace our strength, our functionality, our bodies. But it’s anything but automatic.

For most of us, it’s often a messy journey of progress and regression, an ongoing struggle of battling the stories in our heads, of fighting against the tapes that have been playing in our minds and have been dominating our thoughts since childhood.

Yes, CrossFit allows us to make strides, but often they’re small ones, fleeting ones even, on our winding paths to loving our bodies.

That’s the real story, and it needs to be told. Women need to hear the real story. They need to know it’s OK if they’re still struggling to love their body.

This is why it became the impetus for our upcoming body image series, where the six women of the Morning Chalk Up share their raw, personal, ongoing journeys of finding peace in their own unique, beautiful bodies. Even if they don’t quite believe they’re beautiful yet.