BODY IMAGE: WHAT EXACTLY IS IT AND HOW TO NAVIGATE WHAT IS NOT A “YOU” PROBLEM

Posted on by Laura Geraty – By

To be human is to experience body image. Body image is the thoughts and feelings we have about our bodies. Although it can sometimes feel like it, we aren’t born with these thoughts and feelings. They are taught to us in both subtle and overt ways overtime. In an image-obsessed, fat-fearing culture, struggling with negative body image is the norm. When negative body image drives behavior, it can get in the way of us responding to what our actual bodies need and result in both psychical and psychological suffering.

In this post, I’ll discuss the origins of our body images, the universality of body image challenges, and strategies for self-care in a world that has taught us to fear, and oftentimes even hate, our bodies.

Ultimately, what I want you to walk away knowing is that body image is not a “you” problem. That means you alone may not be able to “fix” it. Until we tear down our current culture and replace it with one that celebrates body diversity, the best we can do is understand why we struggle with body image, hold ourselves softly when negative thoughts arise, and then actively choose to care for ourselves based on what our actual bodies need. This form of embodiment is a salve rather than a solution but practicing it is a form of resistance that can feel revolutionary.

The Origins of Body Image (there was a “before” for all of us)

There was a time in each of our lives when we had no concept of our bodies as images. We moved unselfconsciously, running and dancing and tumbling. We demanded to wear what felt good. We didn’t think about how some specific body part looked as we sat in our bathing suits, or crossed our legs in shorts, or had our pictures taken. We did not think about how our bodies’ appearance might change based on how we moved or what we ate. We trusted and honored our appetites.

We were just in our bodies. Our bodies were just us. We didn’t know we were being judged by others so didn’t know to judge ourselves.

And then this freedom ends. It might have felt like a slow erosion. We noticed that our bodies were different than our friends’ — smaller, or taller, or rounder. We overheard adults complaining about their bodies or noticed that every Disney princess had a perfectly cinched waist and every male protagonist was muscular and chiseled. We wondered if the differences we saw in our bodies were “good” or “bad.” We heard kids on the playground calling each other fat and could tell it was an insult.

Or the freedom of just being a body might have been taken away all at once. Maybe our pediatrician told us our body was a problem directly. Instead of the usual “all looks good” at our annual appointment, we heard, “we need to talk about your growth.” Our parent looked anxious and we got that we should be too.

So it began. We were no longer just in our bodies – the subject of our lives. We were considering the image of our bodies – the object. This is body image and it is with us the rest of our lives. From childhood on, the gaze we feel from others and direct upon ourselves intensifies. The narrative of bodies falling on a hierarchy from good to bad is something we are taught. It is not an inherent truth.

You Are Not Alone

I’ve heard countless body image origin stories in my work as a dietitian. And, of course, being human, I have my own. The consistent through line is that everyone struggles with how they feel their bodies look. You are not alone.

When it comes to how negative body image is experienced, however, it is not an equal playing field. The struggle may remain internal for those with bodies that approximate culture’s beauty standard, which is ever evolving but consistently thin—a racist relic from slavery when white people used body size to justify their supposed superiority over those they dehumanized.[1]

For those with bigger bodies, internal struggles are reinforced externally by systemic weight stigma. Anti-fatness is it the only form of bias that has increased over the past decade. Bigger people face prejudice in education, healthcare, and employment, among other areas of life; and by strangers, and oftentimes family and friends. So, the experience of negative body image is not the same.

If a thin person hates their body, society has no opinion or reassures them it’s all in their mind. If a bigger person hates their body, society tells them they are right to hate it.

The impact negative body image has on our lives also lies on a continuum. It may run the gamut from a mild nuisance to obsessive thoughts, anxiety, depression, eating disorders and self-harm. The more negative our body image and the more we act on those negative feelings, the greater the possible impact on our psychological and physical health. This is because body image is not a reliable ambassador for our actual bodies.

An Individual Problem with an Individual Solution?

Negative body image, we’re told, is something we need to figure out on our own. Solutions run the gamut from predatory to well-meaning.

Diet culture tells us that the key to fixing our body image is to fix our bodies themselves.  Diets, workout plans, pharmaceuticals, surgery, etc. are marketed as the answer. But the issues with these “solutions” are many. Not only do they rarely deliver on their promises of body transformation, they also lead to hyper-fixation on our bodies, weight cycling which is associated with negative health outcomes, self-blame and shame. They perpetuate fatphobia, which is the primary driver of negative body image in the first place. Even if one does successfully change their body, negative body image often persists. The opposite of loving our bodies is trying to control them.

Well-meaning solutions include concepts like body positivity and body neutrality. Body positivity as we’ve come to know it today holds that we should love, embrace and celebrate our bodies with all their imperfections.* While it is a nice idea in concept, in reality, embracing it may run the risk of gaslighting our own emotions. As Jessi Kneeland, author of Body Neutral says, “Rejecting our feelings about our bodies isn’t all that different from rejecting our bodies themselves.” In our culture that so harshly judges bodies, it is normal to feel insecure about them. For most of us, no amount of mental gymnastics will allow us to feel entirely positive about our bodies.

Body neutrality, on the other hand, is the ability to accept and respect our bodies even if they are not the way we’d prefer them to be. As one can infer, it means we don’t need to love or hate our bodies, we can just feel neutral about them. Personally, this feels more accessible than body positivity. And yet, as Kate Manne points out in her excellent book, Unshrinking: How to Face Fatphobia, neutrality is also “hard to conjure routinely about a subject as fraught as our own bodies.”

Instead, Manne suggests what she calls body reflexivity. In her words, “Body reflexivity offers an escape from the apparently exhaustive options of positivity, negativity, or neutrality, by proposing a different focus. Rather than changing how our bodies are assessed, it urges us to transcend the mode of assessment entirely.”

To me, body reflexivity aligns with embodiment, the concept of being connected with our bodies. Essentially, it’s doing the very active work of inhabiting our bodies, or just being our bodies, or as close to that as is possible. Afterall, the division we assume between mind and body is not scientific. It was taught to us by philosophers like René Descartes – “I think therefore I am.” We aren’t just disembodied thinking heads. We know things because our body experiences them first. For every one signal the brain sends to the body, the body sends nine to the brain. So, while the mind matters, the body is primary. The brain is just one part, albeit an important one, of our bodies.

How Do We Practice Embodiment?

Practicing embodiment starts by having accurate attunement. Attunement requires that we

  1. Notice how our body feels (how our bodies communicate),
  2. Connect that feeling to a need,
  3. Respond to the need, and then
  4. Check back in to determine whether our action met the need.

At its most basic, accurate attunement means doing things like eating when we’re hungry, resting when we’re tired, drinking water when we’re thirsty, relaxing our shoulders or taking a deep breath when we feel ourselves tensing, etc. Keep in mind that every emotion also has a physical sensation in our body. Those too are there to communicate needs.

Embodiment is easier said than done. It means being able to hear what our bodies are telling us, trust that information, and know how to respond. Even if we grasp embodiment intellectually, without “data” (i.e. lived experience) it can be hard to trust our bodies. So, like all skills, embodiment takes ongoing practice and becomes easier with time.

Below are a few actionable ways to practice embodiment.

  • Drop down into your body several times a day. You can set alarms to remind you to do this if helpful. Start by asking yourself whether you feel pleasant, unpleasant or neutral. How do you perceive those feelings? What bodily sensations are present? What might your body need according to those sensations? You can try this practice right now.
  • Do anything that engage the senses – e.g. light a candle/burn incense, feel the warmth of the sun on your face, move your body in a way that feels good, listen to the falling rain. Try to slow down while doing these types of activities to see how they feel in your body. How do they change the way you feel?
  • Meditate! (On my personal agenda for 2024)
  • Wear comfortable clothing. It can be hard to tell how you feel in your body if uncomfortable clothing is relentlessly reminding you what’s on your body.
  • Minimize things that interfere with your ability to listen to and trust your body:
    • Curate your social media feed to include as much body diversity as possible. (See below for some great fat-positive IG accounts.) On the flipside, unfollow any accounts that make you feel bad about your body. It can also be really helpful to build IRL community with people of different body sizes.
    • Pay attention to how often you are looking at your reflection. When you do, do you typically zoom in on a specific body part? Try to decrease the frequency of looking at your reflection and/or look at yourself with a looser/foggier gaze, almost like you’re squinting your eyes. Avoid zooming in on any specific body part.
    • Get rid of the scale. What purpose does it serve in your life except to police your body?
    • Call our fatphobia/anti-fatness every time you notice it. If we don’t actively see it, we can’t reject it.

Of course, this is where I note that the aim of the Intuitive Eating framework is to help us become more attuned and responsive to our bodies’ needs, particularly as it pertains to feeding ourselves. This is probably why people find that practicing intuitive eating has ripple effects in other areas of their lives. When we learn to listen, trust and respond to our bodies in one arena, we realize they deserve that respectful partnership in other areas as well.

In short, just start somewhere and build on your lived experiences.

To Wrap Things Up

I hope you take away that you are not alone if you struggle with body image. The thoughts and feelings you have about your body were taught to you over time by a culture that is both implicitly and explicitly fatphobic. The only way we can “fix” our individual body image challenges is to dismantle the culture that taught us to fear our bodies in the first place.

Given that lofty goal, a more accessible salve to body image struggles may be to practice embodiment, a way of attuning to our body that transcends the mode of assessment. This means listening to, trusting and responding to our actual bodies’ needs versus making decisions for our bodies in response to our body images.

While embodiment might seem theoretical, its actually as simple as eating when you are hungry, resting when you are tired, drinking when you are thirsty, and other “radical” acts of self care.

What do you think? Does any of this resonate? I’d love to hear from you in the comments.

“We are wronged bodies, not wrong ones.” – Kate Manne, Unshrinking: How to Face Fatphobia

A very non-exhaustive list of resources…

  • Fat-Positive Instagram Accounts
    • @bodyimagewith (Bri Campos)
    • @bodyimage_therapist (Ashlee Bennett)
    • @alexlight_ldn (Alex Light)
    • @meganjaynecrabbe (Megan Jayne Crabbe)
    • @yrfatfriend (Aubrey Gordon)
    • @thebirdspapaya (Sarah Nicole Landry)
    • @sonyareneetaylor (Sonya Renee Taylor)
    • @lvernon2000 (Leah V)
    • @fiercefatfemme (Angelina)
    • @virgietovar (Virgie Tovar)
    • @theshirarose (Shire Rosenbluth)
    • @fierce.fatty (Vinny Welsby)
    • @iamchrissyking (Chrissy King)
    • @authemmie (Emily Ho)
    • @tiffanyimaakpan (Tiffany Ima Akpan)
    • And so many more!
  • Highly recommended Substack
    • Burnt Toast by Virginia Sole Smith, anewsletter and a podcast about navigating diet culture and fatphobia, especially through parenting (this is $5 per month but worth every penny)

*It is important to note that this conception of body positivity is a complete departure from the fat acceptance movement that birthed it. That movement held that people living in marginalized bodies deserve equal opportunities, treatment, representation, safety, and dignity. Any individual could feel whatever they wanted to about their bodies while still believing that no bodies should be discriminated against.

[1] If this is new to you, read Sabrina Strings’ Fearing the Black Body.