Episode 17: How to Improve Your Body Image

Having a negative body image often leads people to try changing their bodies in hopes of feeling better about themselves. However, research suggests body image is more about our thoughts and feelings than what our bodies actually look like. This episode defines body image, discusses its impact, and provides 5 tips for improving your body image.

Episode Transcript:

Body Image is not a body problem. It's a brain problem.

INTRO MUSIC: Welcome to The Compassionate Wellness Podcast. I'm Alex Treanor. I'm a Nationally Board Certified Health and Wellness Coach, and I am so excited you're here. The wellness industry is full of do's and do not's, should's and should not's. But I like to take a different approach. I'll be sharing all things health and wellness from a joyful, real-life compassionate perspective. If you're ready to drop the cookie-cutter approach and create a life you truly love, while eating a cookie or two along the way, let's dive in.

Hey, friends! Welcome to this week's episode. Today we are talking about body image. Big topic. I feel like body image is coming up a lot recently and that is partially what inspired me to do this episode. I recently heard a statistic that 53% of 13 year old girls feel negatively about their bodies, and that number increases to 78% by the time those girls hit the age of 17. That was...not surprising per se, but still kind of surprising. A little bit shocking. That is a big number.

As I was researching, I saw that these numbers stay high as we are adults, for both for women and for men. It's estimated that 60% of women and 40% of men have a negative body image. That's part of what inspired me to research this a bit for today's episode.

As I was researching, I was also reminded just how tied to other aspects of health and wellness our body image is. For example, when we have a negative body image that's often associated with disordered eating tendencies, things like restricted eating, emotional eating. We also see low self esteem, higher incidence of depression and social anxiety. Negative body image is also associated with negative health behaviors, the actual actions themselves. We see that when people feel poorly about their body image, they tend to also be more physically inactive; they're more sedentary. We also see more unhealthy eating patterns when people feel poorly about their body image.

The opposite is also seen in a lot of the research. When we feel good about our body image, we see less disordered eating, less emotional eating, more self compassion, and a more positive outlook on our health behaviors. Which is interesting, because it almost seems like when we feel good about our bodies, when we have a positive body image, we can clear the cobwebs out of our brain to see the picture more clearly, and be more proactive with some of these health behaviors or these positive aspects of health and wellness.

As we're talking about clearing the cobwebs out of our brain, I want to talk a little bit about our brain and define a bit more what body image actually is. Research indicates there are four different aspects of body image. The first one is called cognitive body image. This is essentially how you think about your body. Thoughts that you have about your weight, your shape, your size, how we're actually thinking is part of body image. The second aspect is called affective body image, which is how you feel about your body. This is sometimes a result of our thoughts, right, our thoughts lead to feelings. This is typically measured in satisfaction; how happy or unhappy that you feel with your body overall, with the individual parts of your body, that's going to be the affective part of body image. The third aspect is perceptual body image. This is how you perceive your body to be. This also includes your shape, your size, your weight. The important thing that comes up with this part is that it may or may not be accurate, right? It's just your perception. That's all we're looking at with that part. The fourth aspect is behavioral body image. And this is the actions that you take to monitor or to manage your body. This might be weighing yourself or dieting to try to change your body shape or mirror checking, right, you walk by by your reflection in the window and you look to see "Do I look okay? Is everything okay?" Or maybe avoiding different public scenarios, different situations that may be feel uncomfortable. All of those are aspects of behavioral body image.

As we're looking at these four different aspects, it's interesting how subjective it is. Body image is all subjective. It's your internal thoughts and your feelings and how those impact your actions and your perception. That's really an inside job.

Body image comes up a lot in coaching, but it's often this undercurrent, right? People don't often come to a coach for help with body image concerns, the body image concerns lead them to want to change health behaviors, and that brings them to the coach. It's a bit subtle. And this is really understandable, right? You feel unhappy with your body, so it's time to change your body, time to exercise more, to change your eating habits.

What we know is that body image is not a body problem, though. It's a brain problem.

And so what if, instead of the first thought being to change your body, you looked at changing your thoughts instead?

There's actually research to indicate that this can be helpful. A meta-analysis that I found while I was researching this topic, talked about how fitness and body image are connected. It suggested that body image improvements were not actually linked with objective, physical changes in what our body looks like. When it comes to fitness, there was actually a very inconsistent connection between those two things. What they saw is that the perceived improvements in what we're able to do (so perceiving we are more capable), that is what impacted our body image. You feel stronger, you feel more capable, you feel like you are able to set goals and stick with them, and that puts you in a positive mindset that makes you feel good. When you have that positive mindset, you have more positive body image.

What we see in this research is that fitness is important to body image, but not because you actually change your body. It's important because you build confidence in yourself, and because you build your abilities and your skills, and that is what actually helps our body image.

So what do we do with all this information? Let's say we are having a hard time, having one of those poor body image days, what do we do with that? I want to give you five research-based steps to help improve body image. As always, not an overnight fix, these are ideas to get you started, but this is always going to be a process, right? It's an ongoing thing.

First at the very minimum, we need to acknowledge the power that our thoughts have in impacting our body image. We just need to recognize that fac. That when we're feeling like, "body image sucks today, and I feel terrible about myself, and how I look", that's a thought. It's just a thought, it's not an actual reflection of our body, or of our worth of our value any of that it's just a thought in our brain.

Second, we can start building awareness around those body thoughts by keeping a thought journal. Many of these thoughts are automatic, we have years of experience thinking these thoughts. When they're automatic, we just kind of roll with it sometimes, right? We're just in our head kind of like the fish in a fishbowl doesn't, what do they say doesn't know what's in water, because it's surrounded by water. That's how this can feel. Sometimes it's hard to recognize the thoughts that we have and then question them can be challenging too.

I want to give you two different ways that you can approach this journal if you're wanting to keep a thought journal. Both of these ideas come from cognitive behavior therapy. They are Googleable, so I'll explain them, but if you want a deeper dive, there's plenty of articles if you just look up the title of them, you can definitely find resources on these.

The first one is called the ABC method. ABC stands for antecedent, belief, and consequence. What you will do is when you are noticing some of these thoughts arising, you are going to write down the antecedent or sometimes it's called the activating event, the situation, the circumstance, something that happened. Then you write your belief about your that event. Your thought, what came to your mind, what you believe about that circumstance. And then third, you will write the consequence, which is how you felt or how you acted as a result. This helps you see the whole process, how they're all tied together, how you have a neutral circumstance that leads to a thought, leads to a feeling, leads to an action, and you can start to identify what might be a more helpful thoughts or belief that would then change the action or the consequence.

Another technique you can use is called the Triple Column Technique. For this, you'll put three columns in your notebook. In the first one, you'll write the thought that you have. In the second column, you're going to look at that initial thought, and write out what's wrong with it. This is called a thinking error. I'll link to some of those in the show notes as well. But this could be, "hey, that's an all or nothing thought, or that's a generalization, or I'm really catastrophizing here, or I'm comparing to something" right? You're going to identify what's the error in the thinking from your first column. Then in your last column, you're going to revise that initial thought. You'll write the more rational thought-out thought that you want to replace from your first column now that you've had some time to kind of process on it. Those are two different ways that you can keep a journal to build that awareness around some of your body thoughts.

The third thing that you can do is to be mindful of your self-talk and to adjust your self-talk. You know, we don't love that all or nothing thinking here. I think it's unrealistic to say, "I'm gonna go from negative self talk of, "I feel disgusting" to, "I love my body". That's a big leap, and there's a lot of steps in between there. I'm not saying, and the research doesn't indicate, that we need to love our body all the time, 100%, completely enthralled with every part of our body. That's not necessary to have a positive body image. What we can do is adjust words and pieces of our self-talk to make it less judgmental. For example, if you look in the mirror, and say, "Oh, my arms look disgusting" that word 'disgusting', is very subjective. It's not factually-based. It's your opinion. It's a judgment. And we can replace that word. So maybe instead we say, "hey, my arms look wide today" or "my arms look round today." Using words that are non-judgmental, more fact-based, more objective, that's what we're looking for. That's what the research indicates is helpful when we're looking to adjust our self talk.

The fourth thing that's recommended is called exposure exercises. To keep things simple, I'm just going to call it like doing the hard thing. This is doing the thing that maybe you tend to avoid, or that you've avoided in the past, something that's been challenging to your body image so you've opted out. It might be going to the public pool and wearing your swimsuit. It might be looking in the mirror after your shower. It might be wearing a more form-fitting outfit. Things that feel uncomfortable, but we can get more comfortable with them, and learn through the experience when we expose ourselves to them.

And the fifth thing that is recommended is to get support. Body image concerns run deep. As we talked about, we have years of experience with them, and it can be hard to see them ourself. Coaching can be helpful for this if you have a coach who is aware of body image and the research there. However, if you are truly feeling stuck, and it's impeding you from progressing, or making progress on your goals, that's a perfect opportunity to talk with a therapist to start unpacking some of these experiences. Body image is huge. When we look at our overall health and wellness, it's connected to so many different. Sometimes figuring out where to start to unpack that is hard, and therapists would be awesome with helping with that.

So to recap, the five different things we can do to improve our body image would be one, acknowledging the power that your thoughts have in impacting your body image. Two starting to build awareness around your body thoughts by keeping a journal three being mindful of and adjusting your self talk for doing that hard thing and exposing yourself to new experiences, and five getting support.

So this week, something to ponder on...I would encourage you to think about what thoughts are most impacting your body image right now? Are they positive? Are they negative? Are they helpful to you? And if they aren't feeling helpful, what can you do to start making a shift in how you think about it?

Rather than making it a body issue and punishing ourselves, and exercising more, and reducing our food intake, and trying to change our body, what can you do to change how you think about it and how you feel and make a difference in that way?

As we wrap up, I also have to acknowledge that this is a complex topic, and we barely scratched the surface on it in this brief podcast episode. There's a whole other aspect we didn't even get to of how society and how our culture can impact our body image, which is a huge concern. If this is a topic that you're interested in, there's an amazing book that I would highly recommend. It's called More Than a Body: Your Body is an Instrument, Not an Ornament by Lindsay and Lexie Kite. They are awesome. This book is great. I heard them speak a few months ago. Great resource for learning more about body image. I will also link their book in the show notes if you're wanting to look at that.

That is what I have for you today. As always, I hope you have a wonderful week and I look forward to talking with you again next week.

OUTRO MUSIC: Thanks for joining me on this episode of the compassionate wellness podcast. If this message resonated with you, please share it with someone you care about. I'd love to connect with you as well follow me on Instagram @alextreanor.coaching, or visit my website alextreanorcoaching.com. And as a reminder, Treanor spelled kind of goofy, it's T-R-E-A-N-O-R. For any references mentioned in this episode, be sure to check out the show notes. I hope you have a wonderful day and don't forget to make time for something you enjoy.

References:

• Body Image Fact Sheet from National Eating Disorders Collaboration

• More Than a Body: Your Body is an Instrument, Not an Ornament by Lindsay and Lexie Kite

• Alleva, J. M., Sheeran, P., Webb, T. L., Martijn, C., & Miles, E. (2015). A meta-analytic review of stand-alone interventions to improve body image. PLoS One, 10(9), e0139177.

• List of Common Thinking Errors