Candice Huffine: 'Please Don't Feel Bad About Your Body Right Now'

From Women's Health

Is it just me, or has anyone else noticed an influx of memes and Instagram captions about losing or gaining weight while at home...despite the fact that normal diet and fitness routines aren't possible right now?

I keep asking myself, “Did I miss a memo that went out?” Did everyone spring into action in this troubled time and say, “Time to get that summer body,” or, “Now we’re gaining weight and self-deprecating about it"?

This time is so unique and tricky and heartbreaking, so where does this cruel body obsession come from?

"Quarantine and COVID-19 can stir feelings of anger, fear, and isolation," says Chloe Carmichael, PhD, a relationship therapist in New York City, author of Dr. Chloe's 10 Commandments of Dating, and a member of WH's advisory board. "We are looking for something that we can control...and our body can feel like it should be one of them."

Throughout my entire career, I've been vocal about how it's unhealthy to focus on working toward a size that may not be realistic for you. In fact, I created my activewear company, Day/Won, to encourage people to focus instead on the things that make them feel victorious. The concept never had anything to do with productivity, but the small things that make you feel victorious at the end of the day, which these days might mean conquering a Netflix special or a new recipe, or just hugging loved ones. We're all just getting by and figuring it out together.

If you find you're getting down on your physique right now or that you're obsessing over working out with a certain frequency, my advice is not to spend too much time thinking about your body image. It’s distracting, it adds stress when anxiety is already at a high, and it’s truly disruptive to your mental health. Social media can either snap you out of it or take you further down the rabbit hole, but lately, it seems like it may be doing the latter, particularly if you follow people who have jumped on this particular bandwagon.

That said, you don't have to expose yourself to this kind of messaging. Use the mute button liberally. Quarantine or not, you need to make wise choices about who you’re following so that you can maintain control of what you expose yourself to online. The content that we invite into our lives is part of our self-care, so if there are accounts that don’t make you feel good about yourself, I recommend eliminating them from your digital diet.

It's okay to take a break from social media, too. For the first two or three weeks of quarantine, I wasn’t on social media at all because I didn’t know what to say to my followers. I felt like I couldn’t add anything of value to the conversation, so I eased back in when it felt right for me. I still try to take weekends off from social (even though every day feels like a weekend now, it's one way I'm trying to treat weekends like weekends).

Even though I don't think it's healthy to put pressure on yourself to "use this time wisely," it's a unique opportunity to get to know yourself better, and discover new hobbies or self-care rituals.

I’m quarantining with my husband and our two dogs on Long Island in New York, for example, and I haven’t spent this many days in a row with my husband since our honeymoon, which was nine years ago. So this experience has been new and interesting and surprisingly great for us, despite all of the hardship going on right now.

My husband is also learning how to play guitar, while I'm over here taking an online course from Yale called "The Science of Well-Being" and watching 90-Day Fiancé (that's fine, too!).

I have not spent this many consecutive days in one place since I graduated high school in 2002, because I’ve been working as a model since then.

Because I've been in this same house for six weeks, I find myself looking out the window like a puppy, noticing things like the flowers and the weather. I feel a newfound appreciation for things I used to overlook.

My husband goes to the grocery store once every 10 days, and we try to spread it out as much as possible. Produce has been hit or miss, so we’ve started to reach out to local farms we visit during the summer. Still, we're eating less fresh food than usual, but that's okay. We're also not working out as much, but live classes through Women's Health's Instagram account or my brand, Day/Won, have made it easy to practice fitness at home if we feel like it. (And we don't always feel like it.)

Ultimately, I believe that quarantine self-care is about being gentle to your body and listening to it. For example, if you wake up and you want to wear the same sweatpants and just transfer to the couch and chill, I don’t think you should sit there thinking about what people online are doing or saying.

There have been many days during quarantine where I’ve thought that I’d get up and check some things off my to-do list, and it hasn’t worked out that way. Sometimes I just do a daytime movie and tea. And the next day I’ll do a little 20-minute run. There’s no memo that went out, there’s no checklist we’re supposed to be following, you don’t have to start a company at the end of this. What’s most important is making sure that we're staying healthy mentally and physically, and as optimistic as you can be during a time like this.

A few days ago, I posted on Instagram asking people to complete the sentence: “During this time I’ve learned _____” and people responded that they’ve learned to slow down and stop taking things for granted. I feel the same way, and I hope these are some of the things we will hold onto when this experience is over.

Candice Huffine is a model, body-positive activist, and designer. She founded the inclusive activewear company DAY/WON.

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