Make peace with your body and get back to enjoying life

Body image is simply the way you perceive your body and any thoughts and feelings you have about that perception. Body image is not fixed and can fluctuate between negative, neutral, or positive experiences of yourself. Your body image is influenced internally by qualities such as your sense of self-worth and externally by societal pressures (such as fatphobic or ageist messages).

Negative body image is any negative sentiment you have about your body, such as your perception of how your body looks, your feelings about what your body can and cannot do, and your culturally influenced ideas about what bodies should look like and how you feel your body measures up to these ideas.

Body image concerns are likely affecting your mental health if you find yourself more caught up in managing your body than doing fulfilling things in your life. For example, you may get caught up in checking your body by weighing yourself repeatedly or checking how you look in the mirror often. Or you find yourself unable to leave the house or get on a video call without putting on extensive makeup.

Some people shrink away from life, such as avoiding public places for fear of how they will be perceived or worry that they will face fatphobia or other forms of discrimination for how they look. You may find yourself developing symptoms of anxiety or depression as a result of this disconnection with meaningful aspects of your life.

Body dissatisfaction refers to a general sense of dissatisfaction with your appearance. You may feel body dissatisfaction around your weight or shape, around signs of aging, or around your height.

Body dysmorphic disorder (BDD), or body dysmorphia, is when you have obsessive thoughts that center around a perceived flaw, often related to a particular body part. These flaws may not be perceived or may be perceived as very minor to other people, but to the person struggling with BDD, the problem feels all-consuming and leads to persistent obsessive thoughts. If you have BDD, you may develop repetitive patterns of behavior to try to find relief from the obsessive thoughts, such as mirror checking, grooming, or picking.

Social media has been shown to negatively impact body image, and if you struggle with body image dissatisfaction, you may benefit from taking some steps to manage this. Some strategies that can help are:

• Ensure you are following people with diverse body types and sizes, including people who look like you - especially people who are enjoying life in the body they have.
• Be selective with the fitness and nutrition accounts you follow - many of these accounts promote disordered eating under the guise of “health”, and often portray an image that’s impossible to live up to.
• Follow accounts that focus on the life you want to be living - people pursuing hobbies, connections, and creative pursuits - rather than accounts that portray a particular appearance, lifestyle, etc.
• Recognize that the algorithm may deliver up toxic body messages despite your best efforts to curate your feed. Take breaks from social media and spend time living in your body rather than thinking about what your body should look like.

Body image struggles can take a toll on your mental health over time. Worrying about how you look can lead to anxiety, social anxiety, or obsessive thinking. Feeling critical of yourself all the time can lead to depressive symptoms like lack of motivation, hopelessness, or worthlessness.

Therapy for body image concerns involves building acceptance for the body you are in. We’ll explore ways to stop viewing your body as a problem to be solved. Instead, our focus is on identifying ways you want to live in your body and pursue anything you’ve been neglecting due to preoccupation with your body image.

Our work may also involve taking a look at harmful messages that you’ve received from society and moving towards letting go of some of these messages. Body image counseling involves acknowledging the harms of fatphobia, ageism, and other forms of discrimination, and making space to grieve the ways you had hoped to escape these harms by trying to manipulate your body size or appearance.

My therapeutic approach to body image, self-esteem, and confidence is focused on guiding you towards a sense of body neutrality. Instead of spending countless hours debating whether you look good enough or acceptable enough, body neutrality involves viewing your body as neither good nor bad. This allows you to focus on caring for your body, living in your body, and focusing on other areas of your life that matter to you.

I also suggest working towards embracing the body you have now, rather than a future body you may be hoping for or a past body you wish you still had. As long as you are not accepting your body as it is, you are viewing yourself through a critical and judgmental lens - and it’s hard to build confidence when you have that stance.

Yes, therapy can help with all of these. Chronic dieting, weight cycling, and obsession with food and exercise often stem from attempts to live up to society’s idea of an ideal body. Therapy can help you step back from these messages and explore what’s best for you.

My therapeutic approach to these concerns draws on principles from the anti-diet movement, health at every size, and intuitive eating:

• An anti-diet stance means that I will not suggest dieting to solve your body image concerns, and I’ll gently explore with you whether dieting is affecting your self-worth and wellbeing due to its often restrictive nature.
• Health at Every Size (HAES) is an approach to health and well-being that prioritizes health-promoting habits instead of viewing weight as a measure of health. This means that I bring into our work the belief that thin is not the only acceptable body size, and that all bodies are deserving of respect and freedom from discrimination.
• Intuitive eating is a method of healing your relationship to food and encourages you to reconnect with your body’s inner signals rather than external rules from diet culture.

Body checking, comparison, and self-talk all require shifting your perspective and developing a kinder inner voice. You can shift your perspective by detaching your appearance from your sense of self-worth. Ask yourself where you got the idea that your self-worth should come from your appearance, and explore whether you hold those values or would like to build a different sense of self-worth based on your own internal values.

You can develop a kinder inner voice by speaking to yourself as you would speak to someone you cared deeply about. Ask yourself how you might treat yourself if you were worthy of care and support. Would you be deserving of a nourishing and filling meal, a day off from exercise, or an outfit that is comfortable and fits well?

If you find yourself preoccupied with your appearance or body size, you would likely benefit from seeking mental health support. Additional signs are finding yourself thinking a lot about food, having rigid rules around food, exercising excessively, or avoiding social events for fear of how you’ll be perceived.

Therapy can help you shift your relationship with your body and develop a kinder, more supportive way of caring for yourself and approaching food, exercise, and more. You can build a stronger sense of empowerment and stop putting your life on pause in order to start engaging in life.