How to Rock Your Body and Clothes with Confidence, No Matter How You Look
If you’ve ever felt uncomfortable in your skin or self-conscious in your clothes, you’re not alone. If I had a dollar for every time someone told me they wanted to look good naked or in a bathing suit when I worked as a weight loss coach, I’d have a lot more money right now!
Many people struggle with feeling good about their bodies and confident in their clothes. But here's the truth: feeling great in your body and your outfit isn't just about how you look – it's about something much deeper.
As someone who's been on both sides of this struggle (feeling good and bad about my body and supporting others struggling with the same issues), I want to share my journey and insights with you. I've learned that true confidence comes from within, and it's not dependent on your size, shape, or what others think of you.
May this support you in feeling good in your clothes, and for getting dressed to be a fun expression of who you are.
- In this article -
When your self-esteem is dependent on others' praise
Feeling fit but confused
True confidence comes from being exactly who you are
Prioritizing how you feel over how you look
Choosing how you want to show up
Separating your worth as a person from your body size
Dealing with bad body image days
Practical tips for feeling great in your clothes
When your self-esteem is dependent on others' praise
In high school, I was obsessed with being thin. I exercised excessively, ate as little as possible, and battled depression. I remember being on a retreat in the woods with other girls in my class. Wearing a sports bra and shorts, I walked by one of the girls standing in front of her cabin, and her eyes were filled with a mixture of envy and longing.
As I passed by, she said, “How do your abs look so good? I wish I could get my belly to look like that.”
I was aware of her mental anguish, but my elation at her praise still won out. I thought, “This is why I go to such lengths to look the way I do.” It felt like a single ray of sunshine in a world of black and gray.
Feeling fit but confused
Decades later as an adult, I am heading into my husband’s restaurant with him for some lunch. A female colleague of his sees us come in. It’s been a while since I’ve seen her, and her eyes go big and round. She exclaims, “You look amazing!” Repeatedly. She peppers me with questions about how I lost weight. She tells me how she thinks she needs to lose weight and knows she should eat less.
Instead of puffing up like a peacock, I am keenly aware of her painful thoughts about her own body, and I feel confused. One thing I know for sure is that I didn’t go into health coaching to make people miserable or to cause suffering. I did it to alleviate suffering, to practice and teach compassion for ourselves and others.
Suddenly, the feeling of looking cute in my clothes is overshadowed by her feeling bad about herself. It somehow feels like I’m winning and she’s losing, which I never signed up for.
True confidence comes from being exactly who you are
These experiences with other women and our bodies taught me an important lesson: real confidence doesn't come from changing your body to meet others' expectations, nor does it come from putting yourself or others down. We’ve got to bring each other up, not tear ourselves or each other down.
These days, comments about my body or eating no longer throw me in this way because I realize it’s less about me and more about the person seeing themselves reflected to them when they see me. But it was an important lesson for me back then to begin to recognize how I was out of alignment.
When I was an advocate for simple weight loss for myself and others, I changed the way my body looked to feel more confident. In doing so, I was also subtly judging people who weren’t thin or striving for that status.
I am aware that, in sharing these experiences, I have been someone who has measured my worth by my body size and appearance and judged others by their appearance too. There were some good reasons for that, for example, my trauma and my upbringing in systems in society from school to the workplace and beyond that reward women for being small, thin, and beautiful by a Euro-centric standard.
I wasn’t aware of those things then. But I am now.
Truly being comfortable in my body and clothes comes when I allow myself to be exactly who I am and not try to show up in another way to be accepted.
I no longer project a false confidence that’s dependent on how others see and judge me. Feeling comfortable isn’t dependent on other’s perspectives of me at all, but one in which I’m the one who does the seeing and doing.
Prioritizing how you feel over how you look
In the examples from my life I shared, I had worked hard on my body through eating and exercise to achieve a certain look. It wasn’t about my internal experience and feeling great in my clothes or enjoying myself more, but about how others saw me.
I’ve spent enough time only concerned with what others think and want of me. In the second half of my life, I am so much more interested in prioritizing my experience. How I feel, what I want, what I think about me and you and everyone else really is what matters most. It’s time for me to be central to my own experience, it feels radical and crazy, and why not?
Can you imagine only being concerned with what you thought and felt about your body? And letting others be responsible for their stuff that comes up in response to you?
Even if your experiences aren’t the same as mine, it feels important to share real stories about how we feel in our clothes and our bodies as a way of moving away from being less appearance-based.
Choosing how you want to show up
I am choosing to focus on how I feel in my body and how I am embodying my values. Living according to values, for example, with compassion being one of mine, allows me to pull myself out of my conditioned ways of thinking about my appearance and how I show up in my clothes.
When we look great, it’s because of being aligned with ourselves and acting from the core of who we are rather than trying to meet an ideal set by outer influences that we didn’t consciously agree to.
Radiating that confidence comes through your clothes and body language when you genuinely feel like “I’m rocking it.”
Separating your worth as a person from your body size
Part of getting to feel that confidence in your bones is the process of unlearning, a series of small daily choices really, more than something you do once.
Our physical appearance can be just one of the many illusions we cling to about how something in our physical reality dictates our experience and either limits or enhances our reality. It could also be that you are trying to prove your value and worth to yourself or others in other ways too - by achieving at work, being successful as a parent, financially, or in other roles.
It isn’t until you know deep down that you are inherently worthy, just by the nature of your being human that the ways of proving ourselves to ourselves and others can start to fade.
Dealing with bad body image days
When you’re having a bad body image day, is it really that you feel so uncomfortable in your clothes? Because as I’ve heard said before, fat isn’t a feeling. Fatis a judgment.
Consider if instead of it being about feeling like you don’t look good, where are you feeling self-doubt about yourself in some other aspect of your life?
As a new business owner, I worried about my appearance a lot at first, especially because I wanted people to look at me and think I looked qualified and trustworthy. I had a coach point out my thinking was along the lines of, “My body is my billboard.” Just hearing that truth helped me move away from that harmful thinking. It starts with recognition.
We may have been socialized and programmed to believe that thinner is better but we don’t have to buy into that thinking after we realize it didn’t come from us, it’s just been handed down without question.
Practical tips for feeling great in your clothes
In addition to my perspective shifts, I also want to share some practical tips and perspectives that have helped me get to a place of feeling not only secure but like I feel great in whatever I’m wearing.
Buy clothes that fit.
You can instantly improve how comfortable you feel in your clothes by buying clothes that fit. When I started Intuitive Eating, I gained some weight. I was working with a coach at the time who helped me to get through this period mentally. But also, I didn’t hesitate to buy new clothes. I always had a pair of pants, or shorts that felt good on me. This included panties and undies. I didn’t spend a fortune, but I knew if there was pinching, and squeezing for too long, I would feel worse about my body than when there wasn’t a constant physical reminder of my flesh against my clothes.
Another level of “fit,” is wearing clothes that fit your personality or feel like you can express yourself through your clothes.
Let go of “thin clothes.”
Give away clothes that no longer fit instead of keeping them as “motivation.” These clothes are not sitting in the back of my closet as my pair of “thin jeans,” waiting for me to lose weight again. As I outgrew items, I gave them away.
Try on new clothes mindfully.
If you’ve gained weight, the key to buying new clothes without destroying your confidence is not looking in the mirror when you try on clothes at the store. Face away from the mirror with your finds until something you put on feels good, then turn around and see what it looks like. Buying bigger pants can just be buying bigger pants and not a critique of your beauty or worthiness as a person.
Remember, true confidence radiates from within. It's not about meeting an ideal set by others, but about aligning with your authentic self. When you feel genuinely comfortable in your own skin, that confidence will shine through in whatever you wear.
This journey isn't always easy, and it's okay to have ups and downs. Be patient with yourself as you unlearn harmful beliefs and embrace your inherent worth. You deserve to feel amazing in your body and your clothes, exactly as you are right now.
Jayne Anne Ammar