What is with our perceived body image?? There are people here who have lost weight and or maintain their awesome level of fitness who STILL have issues with their body image.

Personally, my beloved bf has a pet name for me, "supermodel". I tell him, "NO! I do not look like a supermodel!". Maybe it's me being humble. No. It's not that. While my body (even at age 41) may resemble those that grace the pages of magazines, my face has a pretty full nose. A nose that literally prevented me from modelling when I was young.

I don't care for plastic surgery. Even when I broke my nose, perfect excuse, I rejected the nose job. Proof, in my mind, that I don't suffer from trying to fix what's not perfect in my eyes.

So why can't I accept my bf's most awesome compliment??

What will it take for us to embrace ourselves as awesome as we are?

Obviously, this weight loss thing or maintaining thing has roots much much deeper than we willingly recognize. I say that that way on purpose. I don't willingly recognize that I remember the very day my own beloved mother told me that my nose was big. Banana nose, she called it. We both laughed. It's not even really that big. I think she was "keeping me humble". However, that single moment sticks with me. And I've never told anyone about this before.

Is that true for anyone else?

I think there's a difference between having an imperfection that we accept and are ok with vs. hating something about our bodies to the point where we are unhappy. I think it's normal to have some part of our body that isn't what we'd like it to be, but that is usually just our own hang up. It sounds like you DO look like a supermodel and your boyfriend is sweet to call you that! At the same time, your mom's comment has stuck with you....because she's probably a very important person in your life whose opinion matters to you. I'm so glad you didn't have your nose done because really, the most beautiful models often times have something unusual or imperfect about their features, be it their nose, their teeth, their very dark or very light skin, etc....that's what makes you who you are. However, most of the people here are focusing on their weight, which is something that can be altered without surgery and in our society, overweight is very much frowned upon. So, there are things I don't like about certain parts of my body, but overall, I'll be thrilled to just be thin.

I'm not sure if I answered any of your questions, but I did think your post was interesting.

luckymommy, I think there's something in your response that should be explored. Yes I can't (or more like won't) change my nose. Yes, we can change our body composition. However, we can't change that some of us carry fat more on the hips, or more in the guy or more in the chest or legs. We can get thinner but we really can't change our shape any more than we can get taller or get shorter.

So why is there an issue with that? I remember Courtney what's her name from "Friends" fame saying to critics who called her too thin that she carries weight in her butt. If she wants her butt to be thin, then her everywhere else will be extremely thin.

What do you think of that?

Oh, dear, I sometimes think figuring out this particular conundrum is part of my life's work. Here are a couple ways that I've come at this subject:

The Love of Beauty Theory: Personally, I love beautiful objects, beauty in nature. I love a certain harmony of form. For better or worse, I've accepted much of my society's & my time period's standard of female beauty. I want to see it looking back at me from my mirror. My weight loss proved that I can, indeed, bring about positive changes in my appearance. So I keep pushing, to see whether I can change it more, make it better. My body feels like an unfinished art project; I want to give it my best effort before conceding it's done & I've done all I possibly could (short of surgery, which makes me squeamish because of the operation & the expense).

The Self-Esteem Theory: I don't know how or when it happened, but some wires got crossed somewhere when I was growing up, which led me to think that I was less than everyone else, that I was pushing off my run through life from considerably behind the starting line. And therefore, to draw even with everyone else, I had to put forth much more effort than they do. In short, I had to excel. At all kinds of things -- you wouldn't believe how very good I have to be & in how many areas, just to achieve what I consider to be simple normality. That would include my appearance & my body. Therefore, my fat is not like other peoples' fat -- it's particularly ugly, recalcitrant, shaming & impossible to remove or keep off. This also explains why I'm harder on me than on other women with a weight problem.

The Story of My Life Theory: Being a human who's read lots of books, seen lots of movies & absorbed all the conventions of the narrative form, I make sense of my life by turning into a story with myself as the main character. The story I keep telling myself is that if I struggle hard enough against adversity, and do good deeds, and carry out quests or tasks, I will ultimately be rewarded with happiness. One great task is fulfilling the role of the Perfect Woman: If I am thin enough, athletic enough, pretty enough, smart enough, kind enough, wise enough, hard-working enough, I will finally get all that I've ever wished for. But only hard work will enable the story to end "happily ever after." So I keep working & working, trying to get each chapter in life to end happily. My body/appearance is one of my major lifetime projects in perfectability.

So anyway, those are my different theories -- offered with just a little tongue in cheek ;-) --- regarding why, personally, I keep coming up short against self-acceptance, loving myself, accepting my body unconditionally, what have you. For you guys, I'll put it all out there.

Got any others? I'm always interested in this subject.

I'll chime in, since this was a split off from my thread.

Personally, I think it comes down to two things:
1. The inside hasn't caught up with the outside yet. I was overweight/obese my entire life. I'm 33 now, and it's going to take some time before I see what others see. My brain cannot compute what it sees in mirrors or in pictures. No matter how many size 4 pants I buy, there is a part of me that thinks, "fat."

2. Growing up, I think I was unconsciously conditioned to be the "smart" one. I was brainy/nerdy and good in school and captain of the academic team. (Is it surprising I grew up to be a teacher?) I will graciously accept compliments about my academic achievements, or my teaching, or my research and presentations.

The other side of that is that I was never conditioned to accept compliments about my appearance. I was a chubby, awkward kid - I have the pictures of me in white knee socks to prove it! Well into my beginning career, I had no sense of style, wore no makeup (or tried to wear it and did so badly) and felt a crushing lack of self-confidence, physically.

There's a lot of self-talk going on in my head. I am now making conscious efforts to counter the negative stuff with positive stuff, but it's going to be a long time before my automatic response to "You look nice today," is anything other than, "Eh, I don't think so."

I'm going to let someone else comment on the role the media plays in all this. I think it's a pretty big part of the whole self-image struggle for young women, but I think I'm past the age where I let it prey on me as much. When I was younger, though, it broke my heart that I would never look like the girls I saw on 90210 (the original one!).

Fitness4life, this is not a criticism, but I think the way you hedged your comment about not looking like a supermodel by noting that "my body (even at age 41) may resemble those that grace the pages of magazines" is telling: consciously or no, it signalled that your question about body image in general is tied to your pride about your own. To me, it also signals that, consciously or subconsciously, you worried about being judged for not being fit/attractive enough if you had accidentally implied that you have a sub-supermodel appearance in your post about body image. Because that implication matters.

I point this out because I trace the normalization of the "culture of discontent" among those of us who do not and will not ever 'resemble those that grace the pages of magazines' to the fact that all of us, and not just the beautiful ones, are measured first by the aesthetics of our bodies and then by the animating impulses within them. We feel the need to defend ourselves and our bodies as "beautiful." Being beautiful isn't like being tall or being freckled -- a straightforward descriptive adjective -- it's a judgement. And because it's a judgement, it matters to us. And as long as it matters to us, we will be oppressed by it, and we will always feel that we are not beautiful enough.

I particularly like this quote by David Foster Wallace:
As long as we derive our pride of body image from our actual bodies, it will never be enough. Women who are confident in their bodies are not confident because they have "good" bodies (they may and they may not), but because they have confidence.

lackadaisy-


I've never heard that quote before, and it really struck a great chord with me. Thank you for sharing. I think I'm going to copy and paste that- one day my kids might all need that read.

I'm not the smartest person on the planet, but I'm no dummy, either. No matter how many times I read your post, I still don't get what it says - the first paragraph only. Can you be more blunt? What you wrote is eloquent but I fail to grasp your point.

Is it that what I wrote implies that I'm feeling I'm not good enough? I guess this would be very true coz I can tell you that besides my nose not being tiny, I could use an extra couple of cups in the boob department, too. LOL

Perhaps I do understand your post. I like what everyone has written. I'll be contemplating these thoughts as I try to raise my daughter to not get hung up on similar issues.

Holy crap. If we've got someone on this planet that looks like that with bad self esteem, there must be a problem.

It's liberating to know that all of us humans are the same inside, though.

I always feel so badly for people when they post how unhappy they still are with their bodies.

I wonder if being older makes any difference. I'm in my late 40's and even though I ended up with plenty of loose skin, I'm thrilled with how I look.

Life's too short to sweat the small stuff!

This isn't about weight loss at all. It's about self-esteem, self-worth, and values. EDs from Anorexia to BED is usually rooted in negative body image and emotional issues. It has nothing to do with weight but that often gets lumped in when people get stereotyped based on their weight. There are plenty of thick, healthy people out there who like themselves just fine, feel sexy and confident, wouldn't change it for the world. There are also a lot of thin people out there killing themselves just to try to love themselves, thinking thinner is the ticket.

You can't get to loving yourself and liking who you are by losing weight or looking better. Well, I guess if a person was really vain they could but it's still a self-defeating practice b/c while society values youth and beauty, in reality, they fade. Integrity and core values actually matter the most but society is often shallow, always judging books by the cover instead of content. That pressures people to meet societal standards, misleading themselves and doing themselves a huge disservice.

Recently, I was floored when a lifelong friend of my husband's said to me that I was what he would consider to be 'lanky'. I've never, ever thought of myself as such even when I was much younger. Although secretly I will admit that it gave me a small thrill b/c I'm 39, lol.

Then my husband said I was 'very fit' which blew me away b/c starting in high school up until like four years ago, I was 'skinny fat' and never did much exercise or really paid attention to my diet, lol.

Of course, I do have things I would love to change about myself (too numerous to list) but even after (slightly) whipping myself back into shape, I still find it hard to accept a genuine compliment graciously. I guess, I'm still a work-in-progress. Aren't we all?