Note to men trying to decide whether to bother reading this post: please do! Not only will it help you understand your partner/daughter/female friends and colleagues (and maybe even save you from putting your foot in your mouth when they’re criticising the way they look :)); many of the same issues around body image are increasingly besetting men. The industries which have perfected the art of pressuring women to conform to physical ideals which are simply unattainable to most, now have men firmly in their sights.
I received a really interesting response to my last post on why it’s crucial to improve your body image (i.e. start to like the way you look) before you lose weight. Here’s what Karen wrote:
Hi Robyn
Would you believe that back in the 90s I tried to put on a workshop to this effect (Love Your Body As It Is) with a psychologist, using belly dance and other information. Had absolutely NO takers. Nobody wanted to know! Even doctors were reluctant to advertise it in their clinics!
Thank you for putting it out there. Very important.
Regards
Karen
This really got me thinking. Why do so many women not only a) hate their bodies so much but b) feel reluctant to give up that self-hatred when offered the opportunity and the tools to do so?
The answer to the first question largely comes down to how our perceptions of the “ideal female body” are shaped. In the first place, we look at women around us. Little girls look at their mothers’ bodies to figure out how they are ‘supposed’ to look when they grow up; teenage late bloomers long for the day when they will fill out a ‘real’ bra like their more well-developed peers; and women – often unconsciously – compare their faces and bodies to their peers’, with their self-esteem either rising or falling depending on how they perceive themselves as coming off in that comparison. Even retirees aren’t immune; most older women want to be thinner than they are, even when they’re not overweight to start with.
But in geographically isolated cultures such as the indigenous people of Irian Jaya, what women see all around them is rounded bellies and elongated breasts. No wonder the women in this photo look perfectly relaxed and comfortable with their bodies!
A friend recently told me of a documentary she watched, in which a Western woman lived for a while in a village in Africa. The indigenous women looked at the white woman’s abdomen, which was bare of stretch marks, and asked her in pitying tones why she had not yet had a baby. To them, ‘tiger stripes’ were part of the insignia of motherhood, to be worn with pride. What a contrast to our society, in which creams and oils are aggressively peddled to pregnant women with the promise that will prevent those dreaded (read “ugly”) stretch marks.
Why aren’t we as comfortable with our bodies as indigenous women? The fashion industry and the media play a huge role in shaping – and distorting – our perceptions of the ideal female body (and increasingly, the ideal male body as well). We’re now bombarded on a daily basis with images of super-skinny women. Fashion models today are on average 23% thinner than the average woman, whereas 25 years ago they were only 8% thinner than the average woman.
Think about that for a moment. That means the woman (or, more likely, barely post-pubescent girl) modelling the clothes you see in a store catalogue or on a catwalk, is likely to weigh almost a quarter less than you do! And it’s not just fashion models. Female newsreaders, actresses, performers and even children’s television presenters are, on average, markedly thinner than the typical woman watching them.
An alternative to the ultra-thin, ‘heroin chic’ aesthetic has emerged in recent years: the super-muscular ideal epitomised by celebrity personal trainers and their wealthy, time-rich clients.
Now, owing to the effects of female hormones, women’s bodies don’t naturally become heavily muscled, and the muscles we do have are usually camouflaged by a layer of body fat that is essential for our well-being: a healthy body fat percentage for women is 21-27%, and our menstrual cycle shuts down (meaning we’re infertile) if that percentage drops too low, as ballet dancers, gymnasts, distance runners, competitive body builders and sufferers of anorexia nervosa know only too well. So not only is the muscled look unattainable for normal women whose work, family, study and life commitments prohibit us from spending hours each day at the gym; it’s also potentially hazardous to our health!
Note that this doesn’t mean women can’t or shouldn’t get strong; I personally work out with weights and urge all my female clients to do so too, to protect their bone density and maintain mobility and independence as they get older. But strong and heavily-muscled aren’t synonymous. I learned this while travelling through Indonesia, where I was frequently awe-struck by the sight of both men and women – all very slightly built, with not a bulging bicep or rippling six-pack in sight – performing tough physical work and carrying incredibly heavy loads.
Considering that the foundation of our perceptions of each others’ attractiveness has its roots in some pretty basic evolutionary psychology – heterosexuals are biologically programmed to find members of the opposite sex attractive if they look like a good mate, that is if they appear healthy and fertile – it’s deeply disconcerting that both the ultra-thin and ultra-muscled aesthetics which the media now pushes at us so relentlessly, are potentially harmful to the health and fertility of many (if not most) women, for whom neither extreme thinness nor extreme muscularity come naturally. Not to mention the fact that most men find both excessively skinny and muscle-bound women a turn-off! Both these facts have led body image researchers to suggest that women’s inbuilt tendency to compare themselves, and compete with, other members of what they rather bluntly call the “local mating pool”, has become extremely maladaptive.
Do you think you’re immune to media influence on your body image? Think again. A multitude of studies has shown that merely viewing images of women thinner than herself causes a woman’s own body image to become significantly more negative. A meta-analysis of these studies concluded that the “mass media promulgate a slender ideal that elicits body dissatisfaction.” In other words, women feel dramatically worse about their own bodies because of the images of other women they see on TV, in magazines and at the movies.
Unlike the women of Irian Jaya, the images we see each day are, as researcher Aric Sigman puts it, “demographically atypical, with no geographic relevance to the given female concerned” – that is, we compare ourselves to women whose backgrounds and lives are utterly different to our own. All over the world, from isolated regions of Fiji (where rates of dieting among teenage girls skyrocketed from from 0% to 69% just 3 years after television was introduced, and the prevalence of self-induced vomiting to control weight rose from 0% to 11.3% ) to Westernised countries with a proud tradition of suffragettes throwing off their body-deforming Victorian corsets, women are now engaged in a self-destructive struggle to “Keep up with the Boneses.”
Given all of that, what’s the answer to the second question I asked at the beginning of this article – why do women resist feeling better about their bodies?
I’ve come up with 3 answers, and I’d love to hear yours, too – go ahead and add a comment at the bottom of the page.
Answer #1:
Women are afraid to improve their body image because they mistakenly believe that feeling bad about their bodies motivates them to take action to improve them.
I covered all the reasons why this is completely untrue in last week’s post, so I won’t reiterate them here. Suffice it to say that feeling good about your body RIGHT NOW energises you, boosts your confidence, and puts you in the right frame of mind to make the healthy eating and exercise choices you need to make in order to change your body shape and size for the better. That’s the rationale behind The Mirror Exercise, a key activity included in The LEAN Program.
Answer #2:
The various forms of media – print, television, online, and dedicated advertising spaces such as billboards – exert such a pervasive influence on our values, that we have come to believe we shouldn’t feel happy with our bodies.
The author of a seminal textbook Body Image: Understanding Body Dissatisfaction in Men, Women and Children, describes negative body image as “a normative discontent” – that is, disliking the way you look has become normal in our society. Women who actually like their own bodies may be seen as vain, delusional, or just misfits – how will they be able to join in with their girlfriends’ “fat talk” if they don’t feel fat?
Some might call me cynical for saying this, but many industries and professions profit from this pervasive body dissatisfaction and have a vested interest in feeding it: from the pharmaceutical industry to the beauty products industry; from cosmetic surgeons to personal trainers; from diet meal delivery services to manufacturers of body-shaping underwear; every man and his dog is making a buck out of keeping women (and increasingly, men) unhappy with the way they look.
It’s very difficult to maintain a sense of your own attractiveness when you’re awash in this sea of images expressly designed to make you feel bad about yourself. I use powerful techniques called Emotional Freedom Techniques (EFT) and its offshoot, Matrix Reimprinting to address this corrosive influence of the media on body image with my clients and program participants. I also encourage you to keep a Body Image Journal to hone your EFT work, so you can progressively unhook yourself from the poison drip of messages that keep you locked in the destructive cycle of disliking your body, punishing yourself (either by overeating, eating junk or avoiding activities that make you feel good), then finding even more to dislike about yourself.
Answer #3
Many women don’t believe they deserve to feel good about their bodies.
Early life events such as sexual abuse, body-focused teasing by family members and peers, and inept handling of weight issues by health professionals (such as putting young girls who are slightly chubby on ‘diets’) leaves many women with a deep sense of unworthiness. Their bodies are a source of shame to them, and the whole idea that they could like their body is a completely foreign concept. I have developed a Body Image Timeline exercise that takes you step by step through the process of radically rewriting the beliefs your acquired through these experiences, so you can finally feel good about your body, which is the first step toward transforming it.
I’d love to hear your body image story – share it in the Comments section below!
Leave A Response