Embrace: Love Your Body

It has been a long time since a movie moved me to tears but only the most stone-hearted person could fail to be moved by the Australian documentary, Embrace. Now available on Netflix and other streaming services, every man, woman, and child should watch this and learn how to prioritize their lives to prize deeds over looks.

Written and directed by Australian photographer Taryn Brumfitt, the documentary was born out of Taryn's realization that struggling to achieve a "perfect" body after having three children was never going to bring her satisfaction and she would never want her daughter to follow in her footsteps. She shared a Before-and-After post on Facebook where the Before photo was her bikini body when she starved herself crazy for a beauty contest, and the After photo was her current naked body, typical of a woman with three kids and more important things to achieve than the media-sponsored ideal of a post-baby body.

That Facebook post went viral and Taryn received a great deal of kudos and love for her choice to celebrate her body as it was. However, even while she was chatting with news anchors about having a positive body image, she was extremely disturbed by the outpouring of e-mails from women and girls across the world who wanted to confide in her about how much they hated their bodies. So she decided to travel the world for nine weeks and talk to fellow photographers, models, and people she met via social media to better understand the reasons why 90% of the world's women are "highly dissatisfied" with their bodies.

Over the course of one and half hours, you will see a lot that will horrify you and inspire you. Taryn's consultation with an LA plastic surgeon is particularly ridiculous, and while she has the confidence to laugh off his insane comments, one cannot help but realize that this is why less-confident women end up undergoing numerous procedures in pursuit of some unrealistic and unattainable standard of beauty. This is a documentary about being healthy but not being ashamed of your body size or shape. Take care of yourself, but do not subscribe to the false narrative that skinny is beautiful, or that no one will respect you unless you inject your butt fat into your upper lip.

As an Indian woman, I am no stranger to this focus on the importance of looks. My girlfriends and I were constantly told not to go out in the sun lest we got too brown; the first comment friends and relatives made when they met us would be to say if we had put on too much weight or lost too much (somehow you either weren't eating enough or you were eating too much, there was just no perfect nutritional state); if we were too curvy, we couldn't wear form-fitting clothes lest we look too sexy; if we weren't curvy, we had to wear tighter clothes to flaunt what little we had; and the ultimate goal of all of this, of course, was to get married, because a woman can't be anything unless she has a man with her.

I don't know why I was different, but I never bought into this narrative as wholeheartedly as my friends. I spent my childhood being the bane of my mother's existence because I couldn't bear "girly" clothes and instead wanted to run around in shorts and shirts and swim in the sun and play cricket outside. I was too thin as a child and then too fat as a teenager, and my relatives never let me forget it. It was a relief when I went to Wellesley and was surrounded by women of all shapes and sizes and we usually walked into class in hoodies and sweatpants (or our pajamas if we had slept through our alarm that morning) and didn't care how anyone looked. Sure, there were girls who were perfectly coiffed, but that was just their personal preference, and if you wanted to show up with hairy legs and wet hair, no one cared as long as you turned in your Chemistry problem set on time and participated during class discussions on Victorian Poetry.

Later in life, I started going to the gym, and while my parents thought it was in pursuit of becoming thin, it was really in pursuit of mental health. I lost weight and then discovered I could actually find things I liked to wear instead of spending hours in a store and never finding anything that felt quite right. I realized that dresses were actually the comfiest clothes in the world, but to this day, I have a horror of shopping for pants. I never wear makeup and I refuse to pluck my eyebrows (because once you start you will never stop). And yet, despite all that, I still have days when I think I should go on a diet because I couldn't fit into that one pair of pants, or because I walked into an Equinox bathroom, saw a bazillion naked women in thongs with zero cellulite, and felt like a creature from a completely different planet.

So for those moments when you let the world make you feel like your body isn't right, you must watch Embrace. And if you are a man, watch this documentary with all the women in your life. One of the main takeaways of the film is that we need to praise our daughters and young girls for what they do, not for how they look. It is such a stupidly simple message but it is heartbreaking that we simply don't do this and raise generations of women who hate the way they look and let that prevent them from doing anything productive with their lives. Taryn's final words in the movie are a poignant message to her daughter and I'll let you listen to them yourself because they will stir your soul. For my part, all I want to say is, you do you. If you like putting on lipstick, do that. If you like walking around in torn sweatpants, do that. Cut off all your hair, don't shave your legs, get a tattoo, don't get any piercings, eat some gelato, drink a kale smoothie, do whatever feels right and makes you happy. And then get on with the business of actually making your life mean something. Because when the time comes, you don't want the only thing people say at your funeral to be, "She was a size zero and always dressed like a beauty queen." You want them to say, "She was a kind, intelligent, warm woman, who made the world a better place to live in."