So you saw a picture of yourself that you hated…
It happens to us all. Even when you’ve done the work on body image and acceptance of yourself, there are times where you see a photo or take a glance in a mirror and don’t feel psyched about what stares back at you. In our society, there is an emphasis on “fixing” these feelings, some sort of immediate push to get your body beaten into submission or force it to live up to an unrealistic, Instagram filtered ideal.
In my work as a psychotherapist specializing in eating disorders, I’ve seen the same pattern play out time and time again. What’s the typical pattern with a bad body image day or a bad body image moment? To look to numbers or diets or cool sculpting to work on “bettering” us, making it so that our pictures or what we see in the mirror is presentable.
FALSE. This has not worked and will not work. To go back to numbers, to the diets etc is only continuing the pattern of placing the emphasis on an external rather than an internal for security. We play back into the historical narrative that our body is of primary importance, that’s why looking at the history and culture around body image is so key to healing from the negativity. Diets have always worked as a tool to prey upon people’s insecurities. What do we do instead? How do we step outside of the same patterns that don’t work?
There are so many steps we can take that will actually take care of you in the face of a hard body image day. And they don’t come from focus or fixation on the scale. Gentleness is at the core of all of this, it’s the only way to work through the hard stuff. I think many eating disorder recovery specialists, as well as recovered individuals, set up a false idea that feeling great about themselves and viewing their bodies as beautiful is true 100% of the time. That’s not true. Bad body image days happen to us all. Here’s the secret —
The difference in a healthy state of mind is that we can see our imperfections, the not so flattering parts of ourselves and don’t have to go back to diet culture or changing our bodies to feel better. Instead, we can first recognize the engrained patterns of negative belief systems that are alive and well in our mind. These have existed from experiences with diet culture, with our own parents going on diets, with friends engaging in fat talk all around us. The recognition of the negative voices is key initially in changing patterns.
Second, and this is very important, we put away the mirrors or the pictures for a time. Focusing on the images and replaying them in our minds only distorts the images further. This is because the mind body connection is so strong. If we fixate on what we feel uncomfortable about, we only increase the discomfort. It is actively working against us. Similar to a magic eye picture — if you stare at it long enough, an image will pop out. We can make our thighs or our stomachs pop out even more by fixating. So put away the images, walk away from the mirror. Staring at these things will not make you feel better and instead will actively harm you.
Third and possibly the most important step — we practice radical acceptance with gentleness for ourselves. Do our thighs or our stomach have to be perfect for us to have acceptance for them? No, because this is not where our worth comes from. It’s a conditioned idea based off of years of feeding people ideas and ideals of what they should look like. It’s why in the eating disorder recovered world we can say that imperfection is where we live in recovery.
When we work through these steps, repeatedly, we are paving new pathways in our thought processes. We’re unlearning the links to bad behaviors that we’ve created in the past, those behaviors that tell us we need to “fix” or alter ourselves to feel better. In the past a bad picture, or a glance of ourselves in the mirror could create a negative loop we got stuck in. With these 3 simple steps, we are relearning how to take care of ourselves in a way that sets us up for self-acceptance and long-term happiness with our own bodies.
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