Why Millennials Are Finally Rejecting The Summer Body Pressure

I remember growing up and being glued to Seventeen magazine. Without social media, my girlhood was spent waiting for new issues of all the teen magazines to come out every month. I couldn’t wait to read the relationship advice I was nowhere near ready for, and all of the beauty tips that Gen Z is now horrified to learn about. And more than anything else, I couldn’t wait for the workout and diet tips for the perfect body that were always certain to be carefully packed into each issue. 

Did my twelve-year-old self have any business reading any of the articles in those magazines? No. But back in the 90s and early 2000s, magazines were our social media. They portrayed the perfect life and gave you seven simple tips that would let you live that life, too. They felt like my religion. The promise of abs and toned thighs in just five minutes a day, coupled with the tips that would finally make a boy like me, was all I needed to become addicted. 

By age twelve, I was already in the depths of my eating disorder. 

These magazines only fueled the fire further. I would cut out the skinniest models and celebrities and make myself “thinspiration” collages. Each crisp new issue I opened up every month pushed me down a little bit deeper into the black hole I had found myself in. 

From a young age, millennials were shown images of thin women and told that was what made them beautiful. And if you weren’t lucky enough to be born into thinness and beauty, there was a magazine with a simple summer workout and diet plan that would help you achieve it. In late winter, you would start getting told to get your body “summer ready.” If you started working out in February, you would be guaranteed to be the hottest pre-teen at the local pool. 

As kids, we waited all year for summer to come. 

Summer meant no school and time at the pool or the beach. Summer meant a whole new host of insecurities none of us should have spent time worrying about.

But unfortunately, we did worry. 

I worried all year about how I would look in my swimsuit come summer. I started using self-tanner because the magazines told me that pale skin was not beautiful. You needed to be tan. You needed to be thin. Basically, you needed to be anything but yourself if you wanted to be attractive in the summer. 

I spent my teenage years at my local pool and the beaches of Lake Michigan, and I was mostly miserable. As soon as I became aware of my body, I was in hell. No matter how hard I worked, my body was never “summer ready.” By age 18, I had worked through the worst of my eating disorder, but I still could not make total peace with my body. 

I have not been to a beach or a pool since the age of 18 or 19. 

I haven’t worn a bathing suit since that time in my life. Now, I am 33 years old. I have been so traumatized by the beauty industry and the pressure to have the perfect summer body that I finally gave up on enjoying my summers. I used to love being in the water. But eventually, the pressure to look a way I never could became too much for me. So I gave all of that up. 

Last summer, I finally decided that I was going to buy a new bathing suit. I had spent so long robbing myself of activities I truly enjoyed because diet culture and the beauty industry taught me I wasn’t allowed to enjoy them unless I fit a certain mold. It was a journey, but I finally realized that I didn’t need to conform to these unrealistic standards to be happy.

Enough is enough.

The body positivity movement has been a beacon of light, empowering us to embrace our uniqueness. 

For most of our lives, we were told that everything about us was wrong and that we needed to fix it or we couldn’t enjoy our lives. However, with the rise of body positivity, we are now seeing that it’s actually okay not to be perfect. It’s okay not to have the perfect body because the perfect body doesn’t actually exist. 

Obviously, there is still pressure to have the perfect summer body, but I think it is far easier to ignore now that we are shown so many different types of bodies. I can go on social media and see an influencer with a similar body type to mine still enjoying their life. That was not an image I ever saw growing up, and I never thought I would believe in it. 

Millennials are finally rejecting the pressure to have a summer body because we are finally ready to live our lives. We are finally being told that it’s okay not to look like a model and just to be ourselves. We’re finally permitting ourselves to love ourselves, and I hope this message encourages you to do the same.

I hope this is the summer you finally find the courage to enjoy your time without worrying about your body. 

Featured image via RDNE Stock project on Pexels