Posted on March 12, 2014 by Gwen Pettit

photo adapted for use via creative commons

“To lose confidence in one’s body is to lose confidence in oneself.” ~ Simone de Beauvoir

What happens when you think about your body in a negative manner?  When images seen in magazines are used as a role model for your ideal body type and you relentlessly focus on the body part that you are unhappy with?

Here are 3 critical ways negative body image cripple your life:

1. Physically neglect or ignore your body.

When you focus all your thoughts on one thing in a negative manner, you start to neglect or ignore that thing, hoping it will become less important in your life. Ignoring or neglecting your body has life crippling results. Feel bad about your body and ignoring it looks like:

• Forgetting to feed your body and losing all your energy
• Overfeed your body and gain extra weight
• Neglect taking your body outside and lose muscle strength
• Embarrassed to be around other people and your brain lacks stimulation

When you feel bad about your body, you are stuck always wanting something else. That feeling of never being good enough makes it difficult to muster up the energy to take care of the body you don’t even like very much.

Your body is there to take care of you no matter what. Consider these facts about your body and appreciate what your body is capable of providing for you:

• Your body is the essential vehicle for life and your ability to move, breath, think, love and be everything that is human. Your skin protects you from outside forces and regenerates itself every 27 days.
• Human Adults have 206 bones, 650 muscles, 100 trillion cells and your brain contains about 100 billion nerve cells.
• “The human brain is the body’s control center, receiving and sending signals to other organs through the nervous system and through secreted hormones. It is responsible for our thoughts, feelings, memory storage and general perception of the world.”(Rettner, 2013)

Imagine how you would manage in the world if you lived in a cardboard box or plastic container instead of the very complex body that you have now!

2. Let other people decide what your body should look like.

Compare yourself every day to fashion models and the images you see in the media. Strive to look like fashion models, then feel bad when you fail to achieve that look or perfect size. Using the images you see in magazines, television and other media as the role model for your ideal body type will only create ongoing sense of failure.

What is behind your beliefs about your body?  My nose is too big. I am too fat. I ate too much today. Seemingly small thoughts, yet when you add them up over and over again, you notice a negative pattern that could be crippling your life.

In reality, there is no standard size, shape, colour or image that fits the human community. How dull would life be if everyone looked exactly the same, spoke the same, wore the same clothes, acted the same. How many people are wearing what fashion models do in magazines or in the media? How comfortable or practical do you really think those clothes would be in your town? 

I live in Colorado where the fashion motto is “Function before Fashion”. Which means if you are warm enough: you are well dressed. If you are cold, add another layer of clothing until you are warm enough. That is the only standard for how to dress. It’s realistic and makes dressing simple based on the current temperature and I find it much easier than trying to figure out what is currently in or out of fashion.

What happens if you are striving to be an image of perfection based on an external standard?

3. Forget that your brain is the driving force for your body.

The brain is the centre of your nervous system and all of your ideas, actions, thoughts and beliefs come from that place inside of you, not from what your outsides look like. Remember that your brain is responsible for your general perception of the world and what your brain thinks about your body dictates your self-care.

Your thoughts and your beliefs drive your actions.

David Burns describes what he calls cognitive distortions (Burns, 1999). One example of this distortion is magnification: negative focus on a body to the point that it becomes the reason for every disappointment and failure in your life. Now you have a ready excuse for not being able to improve anything in your life! Failure becomes your expected state of mind.

Leave behind crippling negative body thoughts

How do you get out of these spiralling negative body thoughts? Start by examining your beliefs and track your feelings about your own body. Identify your thoughts and question them. Ask yourself different questions to get different answers about what your body means and does for you.

Some new questions to try: 

Bottom line: how well you take care of this body is directly related to how much energy you have to play, love, work and contribute to the world, but what you feel, think and do have nothing to do with your physical size.

What comes from inside is the real measure of how large you are in the world. So go out and be large in the world.

Sources:

Rachael Rettner, ( May 30, 2013 ). LiveScience

Burns, D. (1999). The Feeling Good Handbook. New York, NY: Penguin Putnam