Improving Your Body Image
Do you struggle with a poor body image? If so, read on.
We all know the purpose of marketing, right?
Essentially, it is sell us something we are led to believe that we need.
It is estimated that we see 4,000-10,000 images a day, of which 92% are subconscious.
While the narrative has been changing with seeing more bodies of varied sizes and colors, the gold standard image for the “ideal” female has been young, white, and slender. Women often compare themselves to this ideal, subconsciously accepting it as the gold standard, and most often find themselves coming up short.
Never mind that the images are photoshopped, and we have no idea the lifestyle and health of the women we see – we just see “ideal” beauty and internalize and accept it.
This goes hand in hand with diet culture, which is a social expectation that tells us how we should eat and look, and that if our bodies look a certain way – we are more accepted. The emphasis is on appearance and body shape and size, instead of focusing on psychological health and general well-being.
It’s no wonder that disordered eating is prevalent, that many women have a poor body image, and depression is on the rise.
If you find yourself looking in the mirror, picking yourself apart, and you are fixated with how you look, you are not alone.
Depending on which study you look at, anywhere from 60-80% of women are dissatisfied with their bodies. It varies by age, but in a study published in the Journal of Women and Aging, only 12% of women aged 50 and older are satisfied with their bodies. And even the women categorized as “satisfied” still were unhappy with specific body parts, like their stomach (56%), face (53.8%) and skin (78.8%).
Body image can be defined as a person’s thoughts, feelings and perceptions of the aesthetics or attractiveness of their own body.
Striving for a positive body image can look like believing in your self-worth as a person regardless of how your body looks. Getting there can take some work, but there are some things you can try to do to start improving your body image. All these points below have helped me tremendously in accepting my body as is as well.
First, you must be aware of your thoughts to change them. Start to notice how you speak about yourself in your mind. Is it negative? Do you shame yourself and put yourself down for not looking a certain way, or not eating the way you think you should?
While sometimes “hating” our bodies can motivate us to make a change, the change is always short-lived. That’s one reason we have so much yo-yo dieting in our society. When we shame ourselves, we disconnect from our bodies, and see our bodies as an object to mold, and we try to punish it into changing.
The reason bad body image and disordered eating are cyclical, is the more we disconnect from our bodies, the less likely we are to listen to our hunger cues, eat when we are hungry and stop when we are full, and choose foods that make us feel good.
Instead, we restrict, limit, or cut out food groups and often completely forgo taste, which leads to binging or overeating, and the “all-or-nothing” thinking that if you aren’t perfect on your diet, you might as well eat all the forbidden foods while you are in a moment of weakness.
And the cycle continues: restrict, binge, restrict, binge. Hate self, love self, hate self, love self. The ability to restrict makes us feel good about ourselves, but because the restriction is unsustainable, we binge and then hate ourselves.
Our minds love to find information that supports our beliefs, so when we go on a diet, and then “mess up,” our internal dialog says something like, “See? You’re a failure. You will never have the body you want.”
There is power in recognizing this cycle and not accepting it as is, and instead challenging its truth.
It is important to separate yourself from your thoughts – they are not facts. You can start to change your thought from a negative one, to one that is less negative.
Once you can start the habit of noticing your thought patterns, you can work on cultivating curiosity and compassion about your experiences and your responses to them.
Where do these thoughts come from? Would you speak to others how you speak to yourself? How can you make the voice you hear a kinder one?
You are with your thoughts 100% of the time. Your life will become much brighter and less stressful the kinder you can speak to yourself – in all areas of your life.
You learned this self-sabotage cycle, and you can unlearn it with some consciousness and effort.
Many times, these negative thoughts follow a pattern, and show up at specific times and circumstances. For example, say you are feeling good in your skin and good about your body that day. The next day you weigh yourself, and the scale is a couple pounds higher than you think it should be. What are your thoughts? Do you immediately now pick out all the flaws in your body and start shaming yourself? I still sometimes fall into this trap (which is why I no longer weigh myself).
Which brings us to a few other concrete things you can also do to help eliminate the shaming cycle.
As I mentioned, ditch the scale. The scale tells you how hard gravity is pulling on your body at that given moment in time. It doesn’t tell you about body composition, how much muscle you have, if you are holding water, etc. It is completely normal for the scale to fluctuate daily up to five pounds. It isn’t worth getting upset over a slight increase in weight one day. So, if it isn’t serving you, stop using it.
A more positive approach is to aspire toward intuitive eating and gentle nutrition.
The intuitive eating movement began in 1995, created by Evelyn Tribole and Elyse Resch, two registered dieticians who authored the book “Intuitive Eating.” It is comprised of 10 principles centered around the premise of giving yourself unconditional permission to eat whatever you want, at any time. The idea is to listen to your body and your hunger and fullness cues. The more in tune you become with your body, the more compassionate and gentler you will be with it, which can help break the restrict-binge cycle.
For many people, breaking this cycle is a major first step in repairing their relationship with food and their own bodies. For more detailed information, I highly recommend reading the book.
Another concrete action you can take is throwing away or donating any clothes that no longer fit. Keeping them around in the hopes that one day you will lose weight and wear them again only perpetuates living in diet culture and disconnecting from your body instead of listening to it and being gentle with yourself.
If one day you lose weight, you can purchase clothes then. But work on your relationship with yourself in the present and tuning into listening to your body, NOT beating it up and “whipping it into shape.”
Along those lines, buy and wear clothes you feel comfortable in. No one knows what size you are but you. If something is too small, size up. It will do wonders for you mentally when you feel good in what you are wearing. And being a larger size does not always mean it’s negative – some people need to gain weight, the weight gain may be muscle, you may be healthier (and happier with more food freedom) in a larger body.
Another tactic you can try to help improve your body image is to go on a visual purge. As I mentioned, you see up to 10,000 images a day. One platform that can very easily perpetuate diet culture is social media. You may need to go on a social media purge (or any other platform) and unfollow any accounts that make you feel bad about yourself in any way. You may be better off looking for and following people who inspire you and lift you up, who may have body types closer to yours, or you follow for reasons completely other than their fitness levels and aesthetics.
Another way to buck diet culture is to stop moralizing foods as “good” or “bad.” Watch yourself and try to steer away from saying “I was good today and didn’t eat dessert,” or “I was bad and had some cookies today.” Food is just food. Eating certain foods and not others has nothing to do with you as a person.
Language matters. Watch what you say to yourself about who you are.
There are more nutrient-dense foods, and less nutrient-dense foods, and it is ideal to eat mostly nutrient-dense foods for health reasons. But there is still a place for those less nutrient-dense foods as well – sometimes simply for the fact they are delicious! Or maybe you are celebrating something. We are not robots – food has a purpose other than just fueling our bodies. Sometimes having that ice cream is good for the soul, and that doesn’t make you a bad or undisciplined person.
Further, if you find yourself commenting on other people’s bodies in any way, catch yourself and try to stop. First, even what you may feel like is a compliment to a woman for losing weight can give the impression that she looked bad before she lost weight. Or sometimes people lose weight due to mental or physical illness – do we really want to commend people for being sick and not eating?
At the end of the day, why do we feel we have the right to put someone else’s body up for discussion? The more critical we are of other people, the more critical we will be of ourselves, too. Or vice versa.
Another behavior that can lead to body dissatisfaction and disordered eating is body checking – where you scrutinize certain parts of your body. Cutting down and ultimately stopping body checking can help you move from negative thoughts to neutral thoughts, to no thoughts. It will take some discipline, but cutting down/out on body checking, while at the same time broadening your idea of what a beautiful body looks like (and the answer is, all shapes and sizes are beautiful) will help you improve your body image immensely.
Lastly, if you have a negative narrative about yourself, such as you have no control over food, and you have all-or-nothing thinking (I either eat all the sweets, or none of them), look for and recognize instances when you do have a treat and don’t binge. Recognize times food does not have control over you, and that you are able to enjoy foods without guilt or binging.
Your thoughts determine your actions - so start telling yourself that you can enjoy all foods in moderation, and then practice doing so. If you falter, be kind to yourself – you are human and you can make a different choice next time. There are no failures – only learning opportunities. The kinder you are to yourself in all areas of life, the more your actions will change on their own.
In sum, you can see that the biggest and first step in changing your body image begins with how you talk to yourself and tell yourself who you are. Work on finding the positives and turning negative self-talk into positive – or at least neutral – self-talk.
Notice your thoughts – if you have a negative thought about yourself, realize it is just a thought, not a fact. Any negative thought should be challenged, and work on replacing that thought with self-compassion. Find beauty in all body types and broaden your belief and definition of what is beautiful. Change won’t happen overnight, but starting with awareness is a good place to begin.
