What do you see when you look in the mirror? Do you see a healthy, confident, happy person? Or are you too distracted by your love handles? After all, those people on your Instagram feed don’t have love handles. Or cellulite. Or pores. Somehow, we have confused our health with our desire to be accepted as “normal” and that “normal” must be perfect.

Eating disorders, bullying and other issues related to body image are more rampant than ever and these are no longer solely women’s issues; there has been an uptick in anorexia and bulimia among young men too as ideals of beauty for both sexes have become increasingly unrealistic. Let’s take a minute to figure out how we got here and whether there is a way back to a healthy notion of beauty.

The Media Ideal

This should go without saying, but we need to stop believing that what we see in glossy magazines and movies actually reflects what normal, natural beauty should look like. The only beauty we find in the media is the fallacy of “perfectly normal” beauty. Unfortunately, unlike Beyoncé, we typically don’t “wake up like this”. The good news is: neither does Beyoncé.

Newsflash: Those celebrities only look the way they do because they have a team of stylists, beauticians, and plastic surgeons on speed-dial to keep them looking picture-perfect for every red carpet and photo shoot. That’s why we relish the odd paparazzi snap of these guys looking like the rest of us! That said, the rest of us can still propagate our own unrealistic standards with the help of social media.

Our Toxic Relationship With Social Media

The online phenomenon of “Fitspiration” started out with good intentions – to keep you motivated on your weight-loss or fitness journey. And this kind of motivation has been very encouraging to a lot of people. However, these images and messages have also fed a darker side of weight-loss culture. Messages, like Kate Moss’s “Nothing tastes as good as skinny feels”, have become slogans on pro-anorexia websites and contributed a great deal to the prevalence of this mental illness.

In recent years, another extreme has flooded social media: the misleadingly titled “Body Positivity” movement, which initially set out to honour bodies of every size but has increasingly turned a blind eye to the dangers of obesity and even become downright vicious toward folks that don’t fit the arbitrary label of “People of Size”.

No matter which of these extremes you have been exposed to, chances are that all those pictures you’ve seen on Instagram and Facebook have been edited to the point that their subjects scarcely look human. While so many fitness gurus are hailed for putting their progress on display, it is still a rarity for those role models to post photos that depict even an inch of cellulite or a nose full of blackheads or #NoFilter – as if this is what “normal” beauty or “normal” bodies are supposed to look like. It’s no secret that truth is anathema on social media or in the cinema, but that doesn’t stop us from falling for the same old tricks.

Health Means Speaking Your Body’s Language

Surely, the best path to true body positivity and learning to love your body is learning about your body. Figuring out your body type is a great place to start: how easy or difficult is it for you to lose weight or build muscle? Then learn to exercise and eat according to your body type. And speaking of eating: learn to recognize when your cravings are a response to emotional triggers or a lack of a certain nutrients. You don’t have to completely cut out chunks of the food pyramid to lose weight; just learn to feed your body according to its needs. Ultimately though, maybe the lifestyle-change we need should start in our minds, not on our plates or our yoga mats.

What Makes You Beautiful

So, what should we see, when we look in the mirror? Perhaps, instead of looking for cellulite, spots, and flab, we should be admiring what we love about ourselves, like the colour of our eyes or the shape of our hands. Or maybe we can discover the simple joy in how we can move, whether it’s jogging, dancing, or taking a walk with a good friend. While we should definitely invest time in keeping our bodies healthy, we should always recognize that that “beauty” doesn’t necessarily mean looking like a Victoria Secret model or the cover of Men’s Health. Listen to your body and eat, treat, and work out accordingly. You don’t have listen to what advertising and social media has to say about what you should love about yourself – that’s for you to decide.