About body image

How do you view your body?

Most of us see our bodies unrealistically. Often we are not even aware of them. We can go through days and weeks never giving a conscious thought to our bodies. It is easy to take them for granted. We don’t always pay attention to how our bodies feel and we don’t view ourselves realistically. Try this: Stand in front of a mirror first thing in the morning before you have eaten anything and look at your body. Now, go eat a bite of something, like a cookie, and come back to the mirror. Do you look different? Does your body look noticeably larger? Most of us will see ourselves as larger than we did just moments before. Intellectually we may know that one small bite of food cannot double our weight in less than a minute, but our perception changes dramatically anyway. This is a clear example of distorted body image and most of us suffer with this to some degree.

We cannot see ourselves objectively. Most of us look at pictures and see only the areas we are unhappy with (and in exaggerated ways). Our hips or bellies may look enormous to us at the time. Later, when we see the same pictures, we may see them differently. This depends upon how we are feeling about ourselves at that time. I often ask women who come to see me to bring in pictures of themselves as children and/or as adolescents. We look at these old photographs together and often women, who thought they were fat at the time, are able to see that they were, in fact, average weight children. For most this is a surprise and, for some, can open the door to looking in the mirror a bit less critically than they have in the past.

How we see ourselves has much to do with how we feel about ourselves. The more we focus on the negative in our lives, the more negatively we will view images of ourselves. It is vital to change negative attitudes into positive ones. Our perceptions of ourselves can be grossly inaccurate and they change as our feelings about ourselves change.

So give yourself a little extra nurturing and see if you don't look just a bit better in that mirror. You may be surprised!

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