Most of the country gets a beach body season, a few anxious months between the spring break ads and Labor Day. Here in Jacksonville Beach it never ends. The ocean is a few blocks away, the sun works year-round, and so does the pressure. Any errand can turn into a swimsuit situation, and every season seems to ask for the same "readiness."
As an eating disorder therapist in a beach town, I hear one assumption more than any other: that body acceptance means convincing yourself to love how you look, repeating something flattering in the mirror and hoping it eventually sticks. Let's squash that right here. Body acceptance has nothing to do with tricking your own mind. It is a shift in perspective. It means learning to look past the body rules most of us received practically from birth and to see our bodies in terms of their function rather than their form.
That shift is hard in a place where the imagery never lets up. So here are three practices I come back to with clients, and with myself.
1. Take a function inventory
When the wave of self-scrutiny hits (on the sand, in a dressing room, in a photo someone tagged you in), pause and take stock. What is your body physically doing right now? Holding you upright on uneven sand. Regulating your temperature in July humidity. Carrying groceries, carrying children, carrying you through a workday. Is there anything in that list you can appreciate that has nothing to do with how it looks? Appearance is the casing. The function underneath is the real story.
2. Tie changes to reasons that are not about looks
Wanting to make health-supporting changes is not the enemy. Handing your self-worth over to the mirror is. If you are working on a change, spend a few minutes a day reminding yourself of the reasons that have nothing to do with appearance: steadier energy, a better blood pressure reading, being able to chase your kids down the beach or paddle out past the break without your shoulders quitting on you. Those reasons hold up on the days the mirror does not cooperate. "Looking better in a swimsuit" tends to fall apart the first time you put one on.
3. Put the kibosh on body talk
This one comes straight from eating disorder treatment, and every household is welcome to borrow it: no body talk. No criticizing your own body, no commenting on anyone else's, and no "compliments" that are really appraisals. Tell the people close to you what you are practicing and ask them to join in. When body talk starts, and at the beach it will, redirect the conversation toward gratitude and what your bodies can do, then move on to something else entirely. You are allowed to be a whole person at dinner.
Try seeing your body for what it does. The mirror is a poor judge of that.
None of this is a switch you flip once. It is a practice, and a contagious one in the best way. Every time you decline the body-scrutiny conversation, you show a friend, a sister, or a daughter that there is another option. Living here just means we get more practice than most.
Our bodies do not get an off-season, and around here neither does the beach. Neither one deserves to be a battleground. If your relationship with your body has become a fight you are tired of having, especially if food is tangled up in it, body image therapy is a place to set it down.
Mandy first explored these ideas in “You Are More than a Summer Beach Body,” published on Therapy Today (whose website has since gone offline; the link opens a saved copy preserved by the nonprofit Internet Archive). This piece is a new take, written for life here in Florida. It’s education, not a substitute for care from a licensed clinician.