My Favorite Family Body Image Workout (Inner children welcome)
Are you ready to jiggle your jiggle?
Most bodies jiggle.
They don’t just jiggle—they ripple and bobble, they sag and droop, they bounce and smush and squish. Skin flaps. Flesh folds. Fat wobbles. According to my 5-year-old, my boobies even boing and floop!
This is just what bodies do.
What parts of your body jiggle?
How do you feel about my asking?
What comes up?
Chances are, you learned that jiggling was a problem—something embarrassing, even unsafe. You were taught to hide the wobbly bits, to tame them, trim them, and feel ashamed of them. And that makes sense—especially when so many of our trusted adults were shaped by the multi-billion-dollar diet, weight loss, and compression-wear industries, all built on the belief that containing our bodies was the right thing to do.
Was it safe to jiggle your jiggle in your family of origin?
In my practice, I see clients across a wide age range—from tweens to folks in their seventies. And whenever I meet someone new, regardless of age, I find myself quietly wondering: Was it safe for this child to jiggle their jiggle in their childhood home?
It’s my private shorthand for a much deeper inquiry: How safe was it for this person’s body to simply exist in the one place where it should’ve been safest of all? Was theirs a home where bodies were celebrated or scrutinized? Was there room for silliness and play, for fully embodied movement? Or was movement only understood through the lens of productivity, performance, shrinking, or control?
That early atmosphere is vital—it shapes not just how we move through the world, but whether we feel safe to move at all.
This is what I mean by a body-positive home: a place where our values guide how we talk about food and bodies, how we feed and move, and how we show our kids—through daily actions—that their bodies are accepted exactly as they are. It’s not about platitudes or feel-good slogans. It’s about doing the daily work of building real skills and resilience to help them cope (and even thrive!) in an appearance-obsessed culture.
And here’s the bonus: When we give our kids the freedom to grow, move, and jiggle without shame, we extend that freedom to our own inner child.
This isn’t just a vibe—it’s intentional, reparative living built from creative, everyday practices.
FYI: All content here is for educational and informational purposes only, aren’t a substitute for medical or mental-health advice, and don’t constitute a provider-patient relationship between any of the professionals represented below, myself included.
Introducing the Jiggle Your Jiggle Dance
The Jiggle Your Jiggle Dance is exactly what it sounds like: a dance where you jiggle your jiggle. It’s a joyous, vigorous, family-friendly movement experience that invites all of us—grownups, kids, and inner children of all ages—to move and playfully explore how our bodies move…exactly as they are.
It’s a lot like a classic family dance party (which, by the way, has health and body image–boosting benefits on its own), but with a twist: intentional jiggling. You’re invited to notice what jiggles the most… and jiggle it until you just can’t jiggle it anymore.
Why?
Because this type of jiggling is liberation. It’s a simple, radical act that can help us break free from fat phobia, repair the deep wounds of internalized anti-fat bias, and reclaim a more positive embodiment.
It normalizes and neutralizes fat and flesh—not as problems to be fixed, but as natural parts of our moving, living selves. We don’t jiggle to burn fat off. We jiggle to release energy and shame.
For our kids, it’s more than fun—it’s a kind of emotional inoculation against the cultural pressure to tighten, tone, and tame their bodies.
Because when parents jiggle with their children — even for a moment — they communicate unconditional acceptance of every inch of them.
Free subscribers, please feel free to watch me jiggle my jiggle on Instagram (of all places).
Paid subscribers, keep reading for a deeper dive into how to use this practice—not just to boost body image resilience in your kids, but to support your own body image healing and powerful nervous system regulation. Plus, join the conversation in the private subscriber chat.
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