Body Image Blues (or Fat Days)

Body Image is something that plagues many people and something that isn’t always often practically understood.

In simple terms, let’s define body image as “how we think and feel about ourselves physically, and how we believe others see us.”

Body Image can be a crippling thorn in our sides, causing disordered eating, and impacting on the physiological and psychological quality of life these include depression, low self-esteem, anxiety, impaired social relationships, and reduced ability to carry out daily activities.

Since I have the stats in front of me, let’s have a look.

In women aged 30-55

• One study reported 73% of middle-aged women are dissatisfied with their weight.

• Another study found that 71% of women aged 30 and older wished to be thinner, despite 73% of participants being categorized as normal weight.

• Another study found 80% of respondents identified the importance of weight or body shape on how they feel about themselves

This matters because there’s also an accompanying rise of extreme weight-loss behaviors, increases in purging, strict dieting, fasting, and disordered eating.

We could go deeper into the stats, the consequences, but if you’re reading this there’s a good chance you already know about them, you’ve lived them, or someone close to you is living them.

As a segue, I think there’s some practicality of being human to consider here, and I start here because I’ve always believed in stoic philosophy. It’s our job to take ownership of our lives and develop the mindsets and tools to buffer ourselves to the external world.

Unfortunately, our bodies will change in women, there’s tends to be a shift of weight towards the torso, an increase in fat mass and decrease in muscle mass (don’t fret, we can modify these things with quality nutrition and exercise), alterations in skin firmness, elasticity and coloration. Hair thins, greys and can change texture. Medications and management of health conditions can also change what our body does (some medications change water retention or change our propensity to gain fat mass or hormones).

Unfortunately, the background of thinness and youth in our media culture creates a distortion that amplifies these negative self-perceptions. We aren’t likely changing this anytime soon so what do we do?

Here’s a list of things that have scientific evidence in changing body self image

• CBT, Mindfulness, and Self-Acceptance practices

• Positive self-affirmations and writing exercises

• Gratitude based workbooks

• Successful weight loss

• Increasing perceived physical capabilities and focusing on body functionality

  • Resistance training

  • Yoga

• Increasing social media literacy and protecting against beautification ideals in media.

So…at this stage, you might be asking…WTF do I do?

I think there comes a time to do a deep self-inventory, What are your values (there are many tools but sometimes a demartini is a good place to start).

Why don’t you love your body? It’s the one you have, whats ‘wrong’ with it?
What is realistic in changing it and what are you measuring against?
What action steps are you taking to change what can be changed that you don’t like?
What is it capable of and are you expressing it?

While not an exhaustive list, it points to the heart of the matter - where are our intentions, and what are our expectations?

I think there are 3 main takeaways here;

The first is taking healthy action steps, eating better - entering healthy weight ranges, exercising, and being metabolically healthy (by objective standards - normal weight ranges, normal blood sugars, cholesterols, and cardiovascular fitness) is a great step towards feeling better about yourself and the way you look.

The second is taking stock in the fact that your body has its own beauty in its function. Regardless of whether you go bushwalking, mountain climbing, ride a bike, walk down the street, or can carry all the groceries in one trip your body is amazing. Consider just how wild it is that this meat suit can carry you through a lifetime.

The third is we can modulate how we feel about our bodies just by thinking about it, what do we like about it? There must be something! Bringing some mindful appreciation, working on gratitude, and appreciation towards it actually works (there’s a litany of scientific literature saying). I haven’t combed all the literature on who does this the best but one paper used this book specifically to design their intervention maybe its worth giving it a try. Maybe its worth just understanding what the media actually does in the images that you see.

The wrap-up

This is a big topic to unpack, and It’s always my hope to give you practical overviews and insights so that you can take some small steps now, If this is something that interests you I can include the links to the research I used or elaborate further on the research and more practical tools.

Your wellbeing is important and how you feel about yourself should be treated in the same way that you treat your fitness (they are both sides of the same coin after all).

Footnote: I predominantly included the research based on the population we deal with most at BLBC and it should be mentioned that men experience similar pressures of body image and that both genders under 30 also experience a variety of body image issues that are very real and very consequential.