No one can deny the power of love. We all long for it and we can’t live well without it. So many of us go on that eternal quest to find love. We seek high and low out there in the world. Yet we often miss one of the most obvious places to find love—within ourselves. Self-love is just as important as love shared with others, if not more so.

Everyday we come across a number of people who are not satisfied with either how they look, their weight, their hair, their skin colour or anything else about their body. This happens in ways in which wither they are looked down upon by themselves or ridiculed by others for not fitting the “perfect body” type which is called body shaming.

Body shaming has been in the news for years now. The only difference is that victims have been too embarrassed to talk about it. The issue of body shaming has recently gained limelight and people have actually started to address it specially celebrities. Many articles have been published against body shaming, specifically fat shaming, and psychologists have claimed that body shaming can induce depression in people and can actually lead to weight gain.

Various celebrities all over the world have come up bashing the media or the people that posts alleged comments about their looks on social media.

In a recent article on abc.net shame researcher and TED talk superstar, Dr Brene Brown, defined shame as “the intensely painful feeling that we are unworthy of love and belonging”.

Brown said that it is a hurt so deep and so powerful it breaks souls and ruins lives. This is the very pain health and fitness media trains us to feel, each and every time our reflections fail the standards they set for us.

Not even has it affected the celebrities but even our friends, our family members, our classmates or ourselves at some point in life. A fellow student once spoke to me about why it is important to love oneself over others. She explained, “Your body should be your first love or yourself. Self love is the best because for me it took me really a long time to understand the concept of loving yourself. Because if you love yourself then only you get the ability to love someone else.”

Also, I feel that sometimes it is “okay” for people to walk out of one’s life if they cannot accept them for who they are. If one cannot be with you or accept you for who you are, for the original you then they don’t deserve you.

So all the girls and the guys who have ever been a victim of body shaming, do yourself a favor. Take a deep breath, give yourself a big hug and realize that you are the most important person in your life. It’s not about being selfish or self-centered, it’s about loving yourself more than others.