From Body Loathing and Dysmorphia to Body Neutrality and Embodiment
Reflections on Healing the Relationship We Have with Our Bodies
Body Dysmorphia is a term young people are throwing around lately. It comes from the condition Body Dysmorphic Disorder (BDD), a mental health condition where you can’t stop thinking about one or more perceived flaws or defects in your appearance, typically a flaw that appears minor or can’t even be seen by others.
People with BDD may avoid social situations because they feel ashamed, embarrassed, or anxious about these perceived defects. They may repeatedly check the mirror, groom, or seek reassurance, often for hours per day, causing distress and significantly impacting their ability to function in daily life.
Someone with BDD may seek out multiple cosmetic procedures and other ways to “fix” a perceived flaw, providing a temporary reduction in distress. The anxiety usually returns, however, and the search continues for other ways to fix something that is not really broken.
I feel concerned about what feels like a “cultural body dysmorphia,” fueled by capitalism. Cosmetics and makeup are being marketed to a younger and younger audience. Faces on social media are beginning to look eerily similar, and cosmetic surgery is increasing at alarming rates. While I believe that we are entitled to care for our bodies in whatever ways make us happy, I worry about the poor sense of self and emphasis on appearance that is fueling this trend.
If our bodies come in many unique shapes and sizes, and we are all interesting and different, then we wouldn’t need so many products and services to “fix” them. Right?
“The Body Project”
My 19-year-old daughter Ava and I recently posted a video series for Eating Disorders Awareness Week on the major video-based social media platforms. She talked about how college students take on a “body project” as a way to feel better about themselves, because social media has convinced them that the body is something that can be altered. It makes sense that when so much feels chaotic between adolescence and full adulthood, we might look for ways to control something.
In comes the “Body Project.” If we just get our ducks in a row, eat and work out perfectly, then our lives and their brokenness will be fixed. We’ll feel in charge. We’ll feel virtuous—or at least look cute when we go out at night.
Think about a time when you felt a lot of stress or emotional turmoil. Did you use the “body project” to feel better about yourself? Did it work? For how long?
The truth is that we can’t change our appearance or shape as much as the diet and fitness influencers tell us we can. At least not safely. Most of the time, our bodies want to maintain our natural, genetically inherited body type. Trying to alter it significantly usually ends up in a frustrating struggle, preoccupying at minimum and harmful at worst.
One of the ways to accept our bodies is to understand that so many forces affect our body size, shape, and health, many of which have nothing to do with how we eat. Heredity, hormones, and lifelong physical-activity patterns (including how naturally mobile and fidgety or grounded and still you are) have a profound effect on your body size and shape. There is even some epigenetics research from a Dutch famine that points to our mothers’ or grandmothers’ eating habits while pregnant affecting body size. (Women starving during the famine produced babies that grew up to be much larger than their siblings.) 1
If you feel bad about your body and feel you must be smaller than you are at present, then you may make food choices that reflect restriction rather than pleasure, exercise to exhaustion and not for enjoyment, and walk around with a general sense of being defective and too much.
Sometimes negative body feelings stem from violation of the body by sexual or physical abuse or by a history of neglect of one’s bodily or emotional needs. Sometimes there are issues around diverse sexual identity or gender. What we cannot express may get displaced in body or eating issues.
When any negative body thoughts—and the behaviors that stem from them—become constant, obsessive, and distracting from the rest of life, then an eating disorder may develop. Even if it doesn’t go that far, focusing on our appearance pulls us away from our whole selves and our greater purpose.
Some of my clients “lose the weight” for a short time or change their bodies in other ways, and realize that they don’t feel much better about themselves. How devastating to find out that changing your body, often something chased for decades, is never the answer to lifelong happiness. They often realize that the “better” life in a “better” body is a pretty shallow life—one which their deeper, truer selves aren’t so interested in living.
Now, please know that I’m not bashing self-care and body care. I’m a dietitian/nutritionist, embodiment therapist, and dancer. I believe in taking good care of the amazing, capable vessels that we are blessed to live inside of in our lifetimes. I believe in the body as one of our modes of self-expression.
I work on helping my clients appreciate the beauty and function of the body. All bodies. However, our physicalities are just one facet of the complicated people that we are. Our bodies are an important expression of the dance of life, and they make us human beings. We need to honor them “whole-istically.” They are our human vessels, and their appearance is not as important as their function.
Appreciating our bodies starts, in my opinion, with loving ourselves and with seeing our bodies as an extension of that self-love. After hundreds of discussions with clients recovering from eating disorders over the decades, I have this opinion. And it often takes lots of work to get to that self-love.
I want to challenge you—whether you struggle with disordered eating or not—to ask yourself the following questions when you say something negative (out loud or in your mind) about your body. Ask yourself, “How am I feeling?” and “What’s really not feeling good right now?”
Give it a try. Are those negative body thoughts coming up because you feel inadequate after talking to someone you admire? Are they coming up because you are feeling judged by a family member? Are you feeling uncomfortable in your body because your dieting friend is ordering the burger without a bun, and you wonder if you should, too? Or because you are spending time with people in thinner bodies and have been trained by our fatphobic culture to value those bodies over your own particular body type?
Getting in touch with deeper feelings of shame, inadequacy, fear, loneliness, exhaustion, anger, and grief that might be underneath those negative body thoughts is challenging and clarifying. The body is an excellent container for our negative energy. Bodies have been used to sell us not just objects, but the idea that the shape we’ve been given is not okay. We often blame and try to change our bodies when it is the greater culture that marginalizes some body types that should be changing.
Body Positivity versus Body Neutrality
There is a rather large Body Positivity movement on social media. People of all shapes and sizes profess their affection for their bodies and show them off. This is how we change cultural preferences. We tend to like the types of bodies and faces we are exposed to regularly, so it’s excellent that we’re seeing all different kinds of models these days, including those with fat bodies and disabilities.
It's important to note that not everyone is going to be able to feel positive in their bodies all the time. This is particularly difficult for those who have physical limitations, disabilities, or chronic pain that keeps them from feeling comfortable in the world. It’s terribly difficult for a fat person to feel positive in an airplane or a restaurant with narrow seating. The problem is the seats and not the person or the body type. Everyone deserves to be equally comfortable.
The Fat Liberation movement is helpful and inclusive. Using the word “fat” neutrally as a descriptor (like long hair or brown eyes) and not in a derogatory way is part of this movement. I invite you to explore your own biases about specific terms and aim to maintain a neutral attitude about these terms and body shapes. We can all end the oppression of people in fat (or any kind of) bodies if we explore the biases that we hold, many inherited from our families and broader culture.
Take a moment to pause and reflect on your own biases around body size. If you like, write a few lines about your biases or privilege.
While I’m all for looking at our bodies in a positive light, these days I’m preferring the term Body Neutrality instead of positivity, which takes into consideration the fact that we can’t always feel positive in a body, especially when it hurts or when the dominant culture discriminates against it. Feeling neutral about your body means seeing it as a vital container for your whole self. You’re not liking it or disliking it. You're not judging it at all.
I will pause here to let you know that some of these truths can be hard to reconcile. You can put down this article at any time if you feel you’ve reached your capacity for growth work today. You can do this any time.
Embodiment (Living Inside the Body)
Since studying trauma healing and becoming a Somatic Experiencing Practitioner (SEP), I aim to take myself and my clients one step further than body neutrality. We aspire toward Embodiment.
Embodiment is defined as “a tangible or visible form of an idea, quality, or feeling” or “the representation or expression of something in a tangible or visible form” (New Oxford American Dictionary).
We’re all embodied selves. We experience embodiment when we live from and inside the body, which is different from living outside of our bodies and thinking about their appearance or being cut off from the information and communication our bodies provide.
Ashley is a client who has been making progress recovering from a pattern of restrictive eating alternating with binge-eating. She’s been eating in a more balanced, self-connected way2, focusing on her relationship with food instead of changing her body. Then, she goes in for a doctor’s appointment and has to step on the scale. Bam! Her body and weight concerns quadruple, and she starts to doubt all the progress she’s made. Then, perhaps not coincidentally, she finds a pair of jeans in her closet that don’t fit anymore and tries to pour herself into them, rather uncomfortably.
Why would she do that to herself? Why sink back into a place of body loathing when she has been working so hard on body acceptance? I wondered, along with her, out loud, if being confident, self-assured, and asking for what she needs (from food, from anyone) is less familiar than feeling bad.
She knows she doesn’t enjoy focusing on what she doesn’t like about her body, but there is some sick kind of comfort in it. After all, the doctor seems to be focused on it (even though she went in for an appointment that didn’t require a weight check—most don’t). Instead of saying that the jeans were wrong, she insisted that her body was wrong.
When I talked to Ashley about her resistance to telling the doctor not to weigh her or donating the ill-fitting jeans, she admitted to worrying that, if she asks for what she needs, she will be “too much” and her needs will be too great. In her inner world, it’s better to be small, not needy, and more in control.
How many people, particularly those who identify as women, worry about taking up too much space, needing too much, being too demanding, or being too “big”? Ashley was willing to let the jeans decide if she was good enough, despite all the work that she had been doing on her personal growth. It was another turning point in Ashley’s recovery when she finally gave me the jeans she had been trying on daily to gauge how she was doing. She was no longer wearing the pants in her life; the pants were wearing her (and wearing her out).
Even more importantly, the scale and the jeans took Ashley away from an embodied experience. Instead of being inside her body deciding how to feed herself in a way that felt good, dress herself in a way that cares for her comfort, and operate from that clear place inside that knows what is best for her, she was pulled outside of her body. She was forced to have the perspective of a mirror—a selfie and not a self. She was outside her body, looking at it, judging it, and using her mind to decide how to operate, not her deep wisdom inside.
Another example that explains embodiment includes a visit to a beach on a warm summer day. When you enter the beach, are you feeling the sand between your toes, the sun on your face, and hearing the crash of the waves, or are you worrying about how you look in your bathing suit?
Can you think about situations that pull you outside your body and move you away from sensing, feeling, and embodiment, and toward judgment and thinking about how to improve your appearance? Even if it feels like you are taking care of yourself, it’s likely that you are more concerned about how others view you, not operating from within your wise central self that knows what is best for you.
Think about the last time you evaluated your body harshly or felt disembodied. Who was around you? What was the environment like? Did you feel disconnected from yourself and your truth? Take good care of yourself as you consider this, because it can be hard to recognize and accept our own disembodiment.
Talk with a trusted friend or professional if any of these questions bring up a lot for you. Journal and write it out, if writing is a resource for you. Exploring the relationship we have with our body can be challenging, but the eventual outcome may be significant healing if done with compassion and support.
We often store a lot of shame in our bodies, and it may affect our long-term health, but it doesn’t have to if we learn how to integrate our experiences of body shame and trauma and move toward more embodied living. It can take some work and practice, but for so many, this kind of movement eventually sets us free from experiencing the body as a burden instead of our incredible ally and guide.
Painter, R.C., Roseboom, T.J., Bleker, O.P. “Prenatal exposure to the Dutch famine and disease in later life: An overview.” Reproductive Toxicology. 2005; 20: 345-352.
Schauster, H. Nourish: How to Heal Your Relationship with Food, Body, and Self. Hummingbird Press: 2018.
Amazing writing Heidi. Thank you.
Such a powerful piece. 🫶🏻