What to do
Reflect on your values
We all grew up hearing about the importance of not judging a book by its cover. But we also all grew up in a world that values people’s appearances. If we were to totally ignore our appearance, never giving a thought to what we wear, we’d likely be viewed as eccentric or strange. We have a choice, however, in terms of how much to care and how much energy to spend on our appearance. We should try to live what we value.
Nichole Wood-Barcalow, a psychologist in Ohio who treats patients with body image and eating concerns and who co-authored the Positive Body Image Workbook (2021), suggests that we should take time to consider what it is, exactly, that we value. You can start by thinking about what you hope to achieve in your life. Maybe you’re aiming for professional success or maybe you most want to focus on your relationships with others. Consider what you want others to value about you. Are you a reliable friend or coworker? Are you fun to be around?
An appreciation of beauty or the adoration of others might be components of our value systems. However, maybe we value compassion, diversity and equality more? Although improvements have been made recently, the beauty and fashion industries have rarely promoted images and advertisements that embrace people of all different shapes, sizes, colours and ability statuses. It’s worth considering the extent to which we want to take our cues from industries that devalue so many of us. Further, it’s unlikely that the people we care about and enjoy are in our lives because of their physical appearance; we experience their beauty in a variety of ways.
Living our values can mean embracing our own and other people’s bodies as they are. This might begin with appreciating that some people naturally have relatively small bodies, and some naturally have larger bodies; people’s body sizes are not necessarily a direct indication of their habits or health. In other words, we all have a natural body size that we’re likely to hover around when we’re adequately nourishing ourselves and engaging in a healthy amount of physical activity. Not everyone will be slender – even when they maintain healthy habits.
The psychologist Renee Engeln in Illinois refers to our cultural obsession with our appearance as ‘beauty sickness’. It’s not that she doesn’t appreciate why we care about how we look. She suggests the problem is when we care about our looks more than other – arguably more important – aspects of our lives. If we spend too much time and mental energy focusing on our appearance, we might have less time and energy for hobbies, friends or family.
Practise body gratitude
Do you ever look in the mirror and feel grateful instead of critical? What would happen if you started to focus on the parts of yourself that you enjoy? Research suggests that expressing appreciation for our bodies can actually improve body image.
So where do you start? When your critical inner voice starts to emerge with a thought such as I wish my nose were smaller, reply to it with I love my hair. For most people, the critical inner voice can be fairly easily distracted. This might feel silly at first, but if you create a list of the parts of your body that you like – or, at least, can appreciate – it will become more natural to automatically quiet your inner critic. So spend some time thinking about and listing the physical features that you do genuinely like, and put this list to good use.
You can also aim to get into a routine, such as expressing gratitude about your body every night when you brush your teeth. The key is to pair your gratitude exercise with another behaviour that you’re already in the habit of practising daily. This way, the habitual behaviour serves as a reminder to stick with the gratitude exercise.
Focus on functionality
Our bodies are much more than a façade; they serve vital functions that allow us to live our lives and experience our worlds. Focusing more on what a body does as opposed to just how it looks can be a useful step toward body positivity.
Body functionality is a term used to describe the many physical functions of our bodies: breathing, sleeping, walking, singing, dancing, engaging with other people and anything else a body can do. Although many people feel dissatisfied with their bodies or even ‘at war with’ them, our bodies aren’t deliberately trying to hold us back from living our lives. One way to reorient ourselves toward our body’s capabilities is through writing and reflection. In one study, women were asked to write statements about 10 functions of their bodies and how those functions contributed to their wellbeing. The women who took part in this simple exercise showed improvements on measures of body image during the study.
Try concentrating on your own body functionality – and even making a list of the ways that your body serves you well. Referring back to your list later might boost your positive feelings about your body following any initial improvement.
Engage in protective filtering
An important part of developing a positive body image is navigating the array of external influences that are apt to make you feel dissatisfied with your body. I am going to focus here on managing your consumption of media that can trigger body dissatisfaction. The bottom line, however, is that you can benefit from becoming more aware of how a variety of different people and environments make you feel, and then reacting to those feelings in protective ways.
Body image researchers refer to the avoidance of negative body image influences as ‘protective filtering’. This is not the same as maladaptive avoidance of anxiety-inducing situations or phobic behaviour; you can function in a psychologically healthy manner while still avoiding certain celebrities on social media. Some forms of media can be avoided more completely than others. For example, you might decide against watching television shows such as Next Top Model or The Bachelor, which feature women in objectified roles with a focus on their appearance. You can decline to buy or flick through magazines that are replete with articles and ads displaying emaciated women or selling beauty products.
Social media poses particular challenges and opportunities when it comes to your body image. Because most forms of social media feature content that’s curated based on your own interests and usage, you can shape your social media world to be protective. This might require unfollowing influencers, celebrities and possibly even friends who embody values contrary to your development of a positive body image. Instead of engaging with those on social media who focus extensively on their own appearance – and cosmetics or clothing that they feel enhance it – you could engage with body positivity activists, mental health professionals and others who offer tools and advice to aid you in your journey toward self-acceptance.
Media has a negative effect on body image largely because it provides endless opportunities to compare ourselves with others. Psychologists believe that it’s natural for us to compare ourselves with other people; it’s one way to gauge how we are doing when there aren’t other, objective metrics available to us. And, when it comes to assessing our own appearance, there aren’t really objective measures. The problem is that we tend to feel badly about ourselves and our bodies when we think we don’t measure up.
We might be especially likely to feel badly when we compare ourselves with celebrities and social media personalities. It’s important to be aware of how these comparisons make us feel and do our best to avoid them. It’s also helpful to remember that it’s essentially (most) celebrities’ and influencers’ job to look good. And they have a lot of help – from hair stylists to lighting to photo editing specialists – so the people we see in the media rarely look in real life the way we see them. And even if some of them do, it’s worth recognising that another’s beauty doesn’t detract from your own.
Reframe your goals for exercise and eating
The health habits that you maintain can affect your body image, but how you think about your habits is also important. Let me provide an example. If you go for a run, but you think of it as obligatory or as punishment (for eating? for living?), you’re unlikely to enjoy that run. But if you think of running as something you do to help yourself feel good, improve your health and take care of yourself, you might actually enjoy running more and find it easier to sustain this behaviour. Further, this mindset will likely support your positive body image as opposed to detracting from it. One of my former students, Allie, recently shared that she had changed her mindset about exercise: ‘I decided I just needed to move every day and not worry about how “intense” my workouts are.’
There is a fairly extensive psychological literature on goal setting and achievement that suggests that when we frame goals in terms of things we want to do (called approach goals) versus things we want to avoid (called avoidance goals), it’s typically easier to achieve our goals. A number of explanations have been offered for this, but one is that it can be difficult to avoid certain thoughts or behaviours entirely, making avoidance goals less satisfactory and less easily achieved. How is this relevant to body image? It’s unlikely that you’ll be able to avoid all the behaviours that contribute to body dissatisfaction. If our goal is to completely avoid foods we deem unhealthy, then we’re likely doomed to fail. But if our goal is to eat foods that are nutritious, such as one or two pieces of fruit per day, we stand a better chance of meeting that goal. When we meet goals that are important to us, we feel a sense of pride that can motivate us to continue on a psychologically and physically healthy path.
The key is to reframe our behaviours in ways that make healthy ones sustainable. Punishing or shaming ourselves for not doing all the ‘right’ things is rarely an effective approach to health (mental or physical) and can reinforce negative body image. Easing ourselves into healthy habits can be more effective for achieving enduring change. A woman I work with, Christie, told me that she used a gradual approach a few years ago to become more physically active. She started out exercising two days a week for about 20 minutes per day, and slowly worked her way up to 40 minutes about six times per week. Most importantly, she told me, ‘don’t worry if one day you run out of time to exercise or just don’t have a good workout. Some days are like that.’
