Living Beyond Body Image
It usually starts small: you begin to avoid looking in the mirror, turn away when a camera is pointed at you, begin buying clothes a few sizes too big, and avoid talking about bodies, especially your own. Or perhaps it’s the opposite: you track your meals (maybe even down to the calorie), weigh yourself regularly, measure your body often, and indulge in the satisfying feeling of “self-control”. Regardless, both ends of the spectrum are focused on the same concern, your body. How it looks, how it feels, how other people may perceive it, and how your body makes you feel about yourself.
The struggle with body image is not new, and many of us have spent years trying to improve our body in the pursuit of something “better” and more “beautiful”. More than likely, every person you know has struggled with body image at some point in their life. Women face the ever-present challenge of becoming more slim, more sexy, and more feminine. Men face the burden of becoming more strong, more built, and more powerful. And no matter what your body currently looks like, it could always be better.
What Is Body Image?
Body image is defined as how you feel, think, and see your physical appearance. It can be the thoughts you have looking in the mirror, the feelings you experience as you put on your clothing for the day, or the way you perceive your body as compared to someone else’s. Every human has a body image. Some people experience a positive body image, defined by feeling comfortable, confident, and at ease within their body. Others experience a more neutral body-image, experiencing their body as neither good nor bad. For many, however, body image skews negative, marked by feelings of shame, unhappiness, or self-judgment. As a result, we try to avoid these negative feelings. Our lives often become smaller, more constricted, and more controlled in an effort to stop negative thoughts, feelings, and perceptions. Our lives can become dictated by our bodies.
Why a Negative Body Image Feels So Powerful
The way we perceive and struggle with our bodies is deeply personal, and often unique to our lived experiences. It is unlikely that we can achieve an existence absolutely free from concern over how we look and how we feel about our bodies. Rather than trying to completely erase body image struggles, perhaps a more effective approach is to learn how to react differently to the negative thoughts and feelings we have toward ourselves.
As humans, we are wired to interact with our thoughts and emotions as factual representations of reality. If we think that our body looks bad, then it must actually look bad. However, thoughts are far more complex than this. Thoughts are representations of our experiences, our opinions, our fears, and our fantasies. The average person experiences nearly 6,500 individual thoughts per day, and there is no way that every single one is accurate, helpful, or even worth our time dissecting. It is painful to think that our body may look bad, or be “ugly”, and so we inherently pay more attention to these types of thoughts. However, what if we could regard those thoughts as just that–thoughts?
Learning to Step Back From Your Thoughts
Rather than trying to argue with a painful thought, prove it wrong, or push it away until it disappears, we can try to notice the thought without automatically believing or obeying it. This can create a small amount of distance between yourself and your thoughts, so that a thought becomes something you're having, rather than something you are.
In practice, this can be surprisingly simple. Rather than thinking "I look terrible today," you might practice noticing, "I'm having the thought that I look terrible today." This can remind you that a thought is a mental event, not a verdict, and not a fact you're obligated to act on. The thought may still show up and it may still be painful. But you get to choose what you do next, rather than letting the thought choose for you.
Choosing Your Life Instead of Fighting Your Thoughts
Once you've created some space between yourself and the thought, you're free to ask a different question: not "is this thought true?" but "what matters to me right now?" Maybe what matters is showing up to the beach in a swimsuit to hang out with your friends, even with the thought still chattering in the background. Maybe it's wearing the shirt you actually like instead of the one that hides you. Maybe it’s taking photos on your vacation to remember for a lifetime. This is choosing to move toward the life you want, even while uncomfortable thoughts and feelings are present, instead of waiting for them to disappear first.
Don’t expect the thought to disappear, or for your body image struggles to be completely resolved. They likely won't. But over time, practicing this kind of distance can loosen the grip that any single thought has over your day, your choices, and your sense of self. You don’t have to win the argument with your reflection, you stop engaging in the argument in the first place.
If you notice yourself constantly at war with your own body, it doesn't mean something is wrong with you. It means you're human, living in a body, in a culture that has a lot of opinions about what that body should look like. The goal isn't to silence those opinions or the thoughts they produce. It's to build a different relationship with them, one where you get to choose what kind of life you live, even if the thoughts are along for the ride.