Body Image and sports, what matters?

One of the great, yet often overlooked, values of weightlifting is the positive body image and self-confidence that it promotes for women.

When you've made a national team, you look at your body in terms of "should I lose weight to be higher ranked? Should I gain weight to lift more and place higher?" . Perhaps, this is true of any Olympic sport where your body weight and composition affects performance, and weight class contested sports seem to amplify the affects of body weight management.

Recently, I watched the documentary "America the Beautiful" (on Netflix none the less). It basically shows a confident 12 year old girl transforming from the next hottest thing in the supermodel-fashion-world to a 17 year old girl, in healthy physical shape, who is convinced that she is obese and ugly. More interestingly, at the end of the movie, it is not that she became overwieght and had to stop modeling, it was more that she grows into a 6 ft+ tall woman who's physical, skeletal frame cannot fit into the size 0 clothes she modeled-in as a 12 year old.

More recently, we've seen a relatively normal to good looking person like Heidi Montag get 10 plasitc surgeries done with the end result of looking like a rubber Barbie doll.

For someone like myself, who's taken a Sullivan-esque approach to body image - that form follows function- I question the above Pop culture examples as: Women, why are we doing this to ourselves? Do we really all want to look like Barbie? this sounds like an Orwellian futuristic world. Or even that episode of the Twilight Zone where all women and men had received plastic surgery after hitting puberty to look identical to eachother.

How does looking like a Barbie doll or being a size 0 in any way relate to your self worth or your ability to accomplish something as a person. Further, do we forget that any surgery is surgery and that women have actually died from elective plastic surgery?

For a competitive athlete, any risk to your life for elective surgery is too big a risk at all. Shouldn't bodywieght, your shape, what you look like be part functionality and just part yourself?

Through wieghtlifiting or an activity like Crossfit, one can sculpt their body to whatever shape they desire by adding muscle and burning fat. Admittingly, some people even gain fat in hopes that competing at a higher weight bring them to a performance optima.

Women, you are all beatiful. (Ok, men too, We don't discriminate at Risto Sports. Statistically women get buy more beauty products and get more procedures done. )

Self improvement should be something you do in library, outside, in a place of prayer, or in a gym -- not under anesthesia.