Negative feelings about the body

Question to Osho: "I don't like myself, especially my body.

Osho: If you have a certain idea about how the body should be, you will be miserable. The body is as it should be. This is the body you have; this is the body that God has given to you. Use it, enjoy it. And if you start loving it, you will find it changing, because if a person loves his body, he starts taking care of it, and care encompasses everything. If you care, then you don't stuff it with unnecessary food. If you care, then you don't starve it. You listen to your body's demands, you listen to its hints - what it wants, when it wants it. When you care, when you love, you become attuned to your body, and your body automatically becomes okay. If you don't like your body, that will create a problem, because by and by you will become indifferent to your body and negligent of it because who cares about the enemy? You will not look at it; you will avoid it. You will stop listening to its messages, and then you will hate it more. But you are creating the whole problem. The body never creates problems; it is the mind that creates problems. Now, this is an idea of the mind. No animal has a problem about his body image, no animal, not even the hippopotamus! They are perfectly happy because there is no mind to create any negative thoughts; otherwise the hippopotamus might think: "Why am I like this?" Animals have no such problems. Just drop the ideal. Love your body - this is your body, this is a gift from God. You hae to enjoy it and you have to take care of it. When you take care, you exercise, you eat, and you sleep. You take every care because this is your instrument, just like your car, which you clean, which you listen to, listen to every hum, so you will know whether something is going wrong. You take care even if the body gets a scratch. Just take care of the body and it will be perfectly beautiful - it is! It is such a beautiful mechanism, and it is so complex. It works so efficiently. It goes on for seventy years. Whether you are asleep or awake, aware or unaware, the body goes on functioning, and the functioning is so silent. Even without your caring it goes on functioning; it goes on doing service for you. One should be grateful to the body. Just change your attitude and you will see that within six months your body has changed its form. It is almost like when you fall in love with a woman; you see that she immediately becomes beautiful. She may not have cared about her body up to this moment, but when a man falls in love with her, she starts taking care. She stands before the mirror for hours... because somebody loves her! The same happens when you love your body; you will see that your body starts changing. It is loved, it is taken care of, it is needed. It is a very delicate mechanism - people use it very crudely, violently. Just change your attitude and see the difference.

Osho, Body/Mind Balancing