What Michelle Obama taught her daughters about positive body image

Former First Lady Michelle Obama experienced dealing with body image in her younger years. That’s why one of the many pieces of wisdom that she taught her two daughters, Malia and Shasha, is to have a positive body image and to just accept their bodies.

Michelle Obama admits that there is some form of a double standard when it comes to how people judge the looks of a man and woman. Unlike women, men aren’t generally as pressured to look a certain age.

“We are so ridiculous as women,” Mrs. Obama told Oprah Winfrey at the Brooklyn stop of her “2020 Vision: Your Life in Focus” tour, Yahoo Entertainment reported. “We don’t want to talk about our age, and then we want to act like we should look like we did when were 20, you know? When, I’m sorry, men you can look any kind of way. And it seems to be okay.”

“I told my daughters, because as they’re getting older they start to judge themselves and it’s interesting when they talk about, ‘I can’t fit in my jeans that I had last year.’ I said, ‘But you’re a whole other year older. You’re now becoming a woman. You don’t have a child’s body,’” Mrs. Obama added.

What’s important is to just accept and be comfortable with their current body and pay no mind to what others might say. “That’s like saying at 20, I’m really upset that I couldn’t wear my favorite overalls anymore from when I was 10,” the former FLOTUS continued. “That’s as ridiculous as it is at 56 to think that I should look like I did when I was 36, or for anyone to judge me like that, or to judge a woman like that.”

But it wasn’t so easy for Michelle Obama to accept her body. One reason was that as the wife of a president and a public figure herself, she was always judged for how she looks.

“People called me all kinds of things when I was campaigning for Barack, like it was a competition,” she narrated. “They called me un-American, and this stuff sticks with you. Men talked about the size of my butt. There are people who were telling me I was angry. That stuff hurts, and it makes you sort of wonder, what are people seeing? That stuff is there. And look, I’m a black woman in America. And you know, we’re not always made to feel beautiful. So there’s still that baggage that we carry, and not everyone can relate to that. But yes, there is baggage that I carry just like anybody else.”

It took Michelle quite a while to accept her body. “I try hard not to judge it,” she said, adding that she’s happy that her body is “all mine, and it’s a healthy body that works, every day.”