Body Acceptance

I would like to use this forum as an opportunity to step up on my soap box and challenge everyone to let go of the term “body image”.  As a clinician who has worked in the field of eating disorders for many years, I would like to shake things up a little bit and voice publicly how much this term grates on my nerves.  Body image is just that - an image and a mirage that will never be resolved, understood, figured out, or improved by sitting in a body image group and talking about how badly we feel about our bodies.  Sorry, that is just another symptom and just falling in the trap of the image based culture we live in.  Healing is not about improving body image - it is about improving acceptance, tolerance, trust, and awareness.  When we stay focused on the idea or belief that we don't like our bodies and get hung up on the dissatisfaction that we feel about our bodies, we stay obsessed and that changes nothing.  In order to heal and improve the way we feel about our bodies we have to live in our bodies differently.  What would happen if every morning you took 5 or 10 minutes to answer the following questions before beginning your day:

• Am I hungry?
• Am I thirsty?
• What do I want to put in my body today - how do I want to hydrate and fuel my body?
• Am I tired?  If so, what would increase my energy level?  Rest, 10 jumping jacks, juice, water, food?
• Am I rested?  How does it feel to be rested - to wake up relatively alert - did I do something differently yesterday or last night to make that happen?
• How can I express appreciation for what my body is capable of and for what it allows me to do today?
• How might I feel if I challenge myself to think about something else when I notice that I am identifying something negative about my body?
• Am I talking to myself in a way that I would allow others to talk to me?  If so, great - how does that feel - if not, and I am hypercritical of myself what makes me listen to that voice?
• What would it feel like to remove the term body image from my vocabulary?
• What if I replaced the term body image with the term body awareness - how might that impact my thoughts?

These questions are merely inquiries of curiosity about how our energy and lives might be spent differently if we were really focused on taking care of ourselves and developing our individual strengths to share with the world.  Call me crazy, but it is the inside-out approach to well being vs. the outside-in approach.  We seldom find ourselves by looking at others and deciding if their standard is the right one for us.  Take care!

- Anne Lewis Moore, PsyD