Turns Out Body Shape Has Nothing At All to do With Fruit

Your Body Shape

Getting dressed in the morning doesn’t seem like one of those things that should matter much. Throw on some jeans, a sweater, run a brush through my hair, and voila.

But the truth is that there’s more to it than that, on so many levels.

I took an online course, a few years ago when I’d just had weight loss surgery and felt particularly disconnected from my body. The woman who taught it introduced a concept called inside out congruence.

Basically, that means that how you feel on the inside is reflected in the way you present yourself to the world.

This is something I struggle with so much.

On the inside, I’m an artist. A highly creative person with confidence and an eye for a funky vintage aesthetic.

On the outside, at best I’m a soccer mom. Boring. At worst, I’ve been wearing the same leggings for three days and I definitely do not project creativity or confidence.

Incongruent.

I’ve been working for the last month with Rachel Nachmias, a stylist. And slowly, slowly, I’m starting to understand things that have escaped me for most of my life.

One of the biggest is my bones. Seriously. My bones. Rachel has a system she calls image archetypes that takes things like your bones into account. She didn’t make this stuff up, she’s just got this superpower for making it make sense.

One of the best things, ever, is letting go entirely of the fruit-based body type system.

Forget apples or pears. I’m a flamboyant natural.

That’s the most common terminology. You can Google it and you’ll find information. It took me a kind of shocking long time to come to terms with being a ‘flamboyant natural,’ if I’m being honest.

An embarrassingly long time.

For a long time, when I tried to do this on my own, I was like — maybe I’m a soft natural. Or just a natural. Or something else. Anything other than the largest body type?

I’m not proud of that. I’ve done a lot of work on learning body acceptance, and it turns out that I still have issues with this shit. For what it’s worth, this doesn’t have anything to do with weight. My bones are flamboyant natural.

Rachel calls my body type the muse. I’m tall (nearly 5'10") and relatively broad. My body shape is roughly a rectangle with my shoulders, waist, and hips all nearly exactly the same width.

To achieve congruency, I have to dress to accommodate my length. And accentuate it. Long lines, not curvy ones. Because I have long lines, not curvy ones.

Rachel is starting a new program soon and I’m so excited, because it will make this information affordable for most people. She’s hosting a free live chat on Thursday (3/12) at 7 p.m. EST where she’ll walk everyone through figuring out their image archetype.

I’m going to be her guinea pig! I sent her a fairly dorky picture my husband took so that she can talk through why I’m a muse (or flamboyant natural) and not some other archetype. And she’ll help the people who show up figure it out for themselves, too.

If this stuff is at all interesting to you, I can’t recommend attending that call highly enough. It should be a ton of fun.

I’m still figuring this stuff ut.

Including how much bringing my outside into alignment with my inside matters. How to do that, of course, but the why fascinates me.

I want to be seen. I want confidence, inside and outside. I want to project a creative, effortlessness spirit to the people I meet in the world every day. Learning how to do that has been a pretty incredible experience.

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