With deep-set eyes and a radiant smile, Iza Calzado is someone you’d think the word “beautiful” was made for. But it hasn’t always been for her. Growing up, being beautiful was something she attributed to various people but herself. She saw it in beauty queens and celebirties with their million-peso smiles.
In her episode of PORTRAITS: #MakeBigMoves by Globe, she shared that as a child, she hasn’t always been conscious of what she looked like. Not until first or second grade, at least. It was by this time that she dipped her toes into show business and started doing a few commercials, movies, and TV guestings. Even then, she remembered that it wasn’t the ‘prettier kids’ whom she compared herself with, but her mother. “My mother was very tisay, which I wasn’t. When I took swimming classes when I was young, my skin became darker—which I didn’t really mind, I loved it. But I wanted to look more like my mother.”
“Of all the industries I could get into, showbiz pa!” Iza laughingly remarked when asked how getting into show business affected her self-image. Her line of work is not for the faint of heart. Stardom is a status many covet; it’s a lucrative career that does more than just pay the bills. Despite this, it’s a pursuit that came with its tolls—being on the limelight 24/7 is one. When you’re a public figure, people feel entitled to drop their two cents over what you do and how you look like.
Her big move, Iza says, didn’t come as a full 360-degree turn. In her own ways, she has always drummed up her battle cry—from her inner circles to major publications. “When I did a cover for Cosmopolitan magazine, I remember saying in an interview [that] ‘My hips are my hips, they’re just there’…and then in Marie Claire, where I said ‘I’m perfectly imperfect.’ I’ve always been on that journey. I just didn’t have the word for it yet.”
Nor was it linear, Iza added. “It was a chacha of back and forth. Five steps forward, but sometimes you fall 20 steps backward.” She abused her body. “There was a time when though I ate better and worked out, the goal was still to be thin, so it still wasn’t healthy.”
Photos by Karen De La Fuente
Her tipping point came when she discovered Nola Trees’ body positivity account. She recalled one post where Nola Trees posted a photo of her naked body, baring her stretchmarks, and shared her story. At that moment, she found herself shed a tear and wished she could do that too.
“But there was something holding me back ’cause I’m still a celebrity.” It wasn’t a lever she could just press at the drop of a hat. She went with it one little step at a time, starting by telling one of the people she worked with last year not to edit the stretchmarks on her arms.
Now, she’s grateful with the tribe surrounds herself with. They have been her northern stars to her journey towards her personal crusade, the Body Love Revolution. For her, amid the phrase ‘body love’, in reality, it is a celebration of self-love. “Have a sound mind, body, and spirit. If you work on one area, the others will follow. The hardest part is to accept your physical appearance. That’s the first step. Everything else will follow if you’re kind to yourself.”
With this in mind, along with the movement she spearheaded, she practices several things to love herself more. One of them is gratitude. Iza writes on her journal everyday—chronicling everything she is thankful for, from tentpole milestones to the little pleasures in life. “One small seed of negativity can snowball into something that swallows you up. On the other hand, it’s also one positive thought about yourself and the world that could turn that around.”
“I think even before, I’ve always held the same belief that ‘Beauty is more than skin-deep’, but now, I believe it more.” Iza replied when asked of what beauty means to her now. According to her, though we still notice our physical aspects in the form of our faces and bodies, they are nothing but “vehicles” to our soul—which is the true source of our beauty, “Beauty is rooted on something else than my physical appearance. It’s in the way that I dance. the way that I talk to people. It’s in the way that I love people, the way that I act, so many things other than the physical.” Iza added.
Watch Iza #MakeBigMoves on her episode of PORTRAITS. To know more about Iza, you may follow her on Twitter and Instagram.
