The Life You Want
Page 20
5. How do I prevent the obstacle from occurring in the first place? Again, be precise. For example: “I could make ten o’clock my new bedtime, and from now on read the newspaper later in the day.”
6. How, specifically, should I achieve my exercise goal? This means focusing on specifically when and where it will happen. For example: “Between six-thirty and seven in the morning, I’ll exercise with a thirty-minute aerobics video in my living room and then take a shower.”
STAYING MOTIVATED
Making excuses can be habit forming. When one excuse is plainly no longer legitimate, you come up with another one and then another one. It feeds on itself. On the other hand, overcoming excuse making is freeing. You can stop hemming and hawing and wasting energy trying to come up with reasons why you can’t exercise. Instead you see things very clearly. You are an exerciser, it’s part of your life, you (to borrow a phrase) just do it. It’s like dinner, a part of your day, a ritual. When you reach this point, you don’t even have to worry about staying motivated. You’ve become a different person. An active person.
5
* * *
TRANSFORMING
YOUR BODY IMAGE
* * *
By Ann Kearney-Cooke
TAKE A SECOND TO think about your body: What springs to mind? Are your thoughts mostly positive, primarily negative, or somewhere in between? About half of us— 56 percent of women and 43 percent of men—are dissatisfied with our overall appearance. I think it’s safe to say that if you’re reading this book, there’s a good chance you’re in that camp as well. Don’t worry, we’re going to help get you out of it.
Maybe you have a generally healthy body image but struggle a little. (Say you’re fixated on one area, like your legs or your stomach.) Most people can pinpoint things they like about themselves—including their hair, face, and height—if they’re asked to, but a large percentage still admit to feeling unhappy about their body—in particular, their abdomen and weight. In fact, according to research, an astounding 89 percent of people say they want to lose weight. Even in these cases, it’s worth working to accept and even embrace your body. That’s because your body image, or the mental representation you have of your body and the thoughts and feelings that go along with it, affects your self-esteem, which in turn influences every area of your life. Studies have linked low body image to anxiety, depression, sexual dysfunction, and eating disorders.
If your body image is lacking, you’re more likely to feel unworthy of good things in your life. This pessimism may then affect relationships with friends, family, and coworkers, and it factors into everyday decisions, such as what you eat, how you dress, and where you go. In the end, your lack of confidence and the dissatisfaction you feel with yourself will prevent you from ever trying to repair your fundamental body image issues.
Fortunately, you have the ability to change. In this chapter, you’re going to learn to start seeing your body from a new perspective, and if you have a poor body image, you’re going to work on improving it. You might even discover that you’re actually hanging on to these negative or bad feelings about your body—maybe because you fear you’ll lose your motivation to slim down or get in shape if you become more comfortable and accepting of yourself. Or perhaps you’ve always made light of your weight and body image, insulting and hurting yourself before anyone else can. You might think it’s easier when you’re the one telling the fat jokes. It could even be that it’s just more comfortable for you to live with these negative feelings. Holding on to a poor body image can be soothing, oddly enough—the belief that you’re not attractive or not worthy feels familiar and safe. You might even derive a hidden sense of pleasure in living up (or down) to the expectations of overly critical parents or others that have been drilled into your head for years, or that you’ve heard time and time again from an emotionally abusive spouse. For many people, being fat simply becomes part of who they are. Learning to accept and love yourself requires letting go of this identity and creating a new one for yourself, and that can be very difficult.
But accepting and believing that you are worth it, that you do deserve happiness, and that your body is good and beautiful and strong are profound changes that only breed more happiness and confidence. When you feel good about yourself and your body, you’ll want to take care of it, feed it healthy foods, exercise, and insist that the world treat you with respect. Feeling strong brings about changes in other areas of your life, too. You’ll carry yourself with more confidence, which could help you advance in your career, strengthen your relationship with a significant other, make you a better parent, give you the courage to try new things and experiences—the list is really endless.
So it’s time for you and your body to end the rivalry and join the same team, because you can’t live a healthy, motivated life without feeling good about yourself and your body. Not to mention, if you don’t learn to value yourself and your body, it becomes even easier to give in to the temptations to stop eating healthfully and exercising. The first step toward acceptance: letting go of negative versions of yourself and your body. Every time you catch yourself saying or thinking things like: I will never be fit, I will never be attractive, I will never be sexy again, I can never stop overeating, and so forth, replace them with body-positive mantras such as: I can be attractive; I can be fit; people do overcome overeating, and I am going to be one of them.
If you’ve struggled with your body image since you were a child, it’s time to acknowledge that you can’t change what was said about or done to your body in the past. However, you are in charge of how you treat, talk to, and relate to your body and how you allow others to do the same! And if your body image issues are more recent, you’re going to figure out where they came from and learn how to turn things around.
BODY IMAGE BASICS
Body image might not get a lot of attention until the teen years. You often hear about middle school and high school as a formative time for body image issues. Girls struggle with eating disorders and the pressure to be thin, and young boys also deal with the stress of trying to fit in. Yet, by then, your body image has been developing for many years. Your view of yourself originates with the positive or negative reactions—words, nonverbal cues, and touch—of your parents. As a child, you internalized the ways that you were touched, talked about, and accepted or rejected by others throughout your development.
Marie Lewis, a thirty-five-year-old overweight woman, describes the impact that her parents had on her in the following way: “Being around my overly critical parents has left scars. From as early as I can remember, my mother and father told me I was fat and needed to lose weight. As a result, when I look at myself, I focus on what I don’t like about my body. Instead of saying, ‘I have lost over thirty pounds in the past year, and I am more fit now than when I was a teenager,’ I say, ‘You are fat and have huge thighs and a huge stomach.’ It’s as if my parents’ harsh words from the past were branded into my brain. They leave me feeling hopeless and unmotivated.”
Sometimes the criticisms from parents are more subtle. While your mother and father may not have been as blunt as Marie’s, they may have still communicated their dissatisfaction with your body or looks by saying things like: “You’re not going to eat that whole piece, are you?” or “You know you don’t look good in blue; why don’t you go change?” or perhaps your parents never said anything—good or bad—about your body. Even still, they had a major effect on your body image; how they felt and talked about their own bodies shaped the way you see yours. If you grew up with a mother who was constantly putting herself down—“I look horrible in a bathing suit” or “I hate my arms”—it’s almost inevitable that you’ll inherit some of this negative thinking about your own body. Or maybe your mother was always on a diet. The message that sends is that thin is ideal and everything else is unacceptable. Ironically, it could even be that your parents did everything right: They were supportive and encouraging and were healthy role models themselves, but the pr
essure you put on yourself to live up to their example sent you in the opposite direction. This is what happened with Tracy Ring (whom you met in chapter 4), one of the Best life challengers who was profiled on The Oprah Winfrey Show. Her parents lived a very active life and encouraged her to do the same. But this only backfired: Tracy ended up doing whatever she could to avoid exercise. Fortunately, she was able to work through it, and now she’s participating in triathlons. She has completely turned her life around.
As you remember back to your childhood, also try to think of your friends or classmates and how they treated you; they may have also had a hand in how you feel about your body, as teasing or bullying during adolescence can lead to poor body image. Something as seemingly minor as being picked last for a team in gym class, not being asked to the prom, or being excluded by the popular clique can leave a mark, whether you’re aware of it or not. And traumatic events such as sexual or physical abuse can have a profound and often devastating effect on body image, leaving the victim feeling dirty or ashamed.
All of these things form the basis of body image, but as you go through various stages of your life (school, career, marriage, family, and so on), it continues to change and evolve. This can be a good thing. For instance, if you’ve struggled with your body image as a child, you may have gained a healthier perspective as you grew into adulthood. I often see this with young women after they give birth. They develop a new respect for their body because they’ve turned their focus to what it can do (carry a baby, birth a baby, breastfeed), not just how it looks.
The countless images and messages we’re exposed to on a daily basis throughout our lifetime also play a role in our body image. The media helps set a culture’s standard of beauty. The ideals in our culture are so unrealistic that less than 5 percent of the population meet them. Research shows that twenty-five years ago, top models and beauty queens weighed only 8 percent less than the average woman; now they weigh at least 23 percent less. Unfortunately, many of the ideals that define beauty are computer generated: Blemishes are buffed out, legs are made longer or thinner, and any trace of fat is airbrushed away. Yet there’s pressure to try to live up to these images, no matter how unrealistic or unhealthy they are.
Anne Becker, a Harvard anthropologist who had been studying life on Fiji since 1988, carried out a really interesting research project. On the small island in the Pacific Ocean, the fuller-figured woman was once the cultural ideal. In fact, there were essentially no cases of eating disorders prior to 1995. What happened in 1995 to change things, you might be wondering. That’s when the island’s only TV station started broadcasting American shows like ER and Melrose Place, which featured predominately thin actresses. Three years later, Becker found that 74 percent of girls felt they were “too fat or too big,” and 11 percent reported that they’d practiced purging to control their weight.
Another factor that influences body image: how you’re feeling in general. For instance, when something isn’t going quite right in your life—a failing relationship, financial stress, the loss of a job—you may project this negative feeling onto your body. So instead of saying that something is wrong with your relationship, your finances, or your work, you say that something is wrong with your body. I see this problem with so many of my clients.
As you can see, body image is complicated: It’s shaped by your history as well as your here and now. It’s influenced by other people—your relationships from the past as well as the present ones—and by personal factors, from your mood and beliefs, to your body type and weight. And it’s also affected by outside forces, like our culture. Taking the time to assess how you view your body, and why, is the first step to understanding and accepting yourself. Then you can begin to gradually chip away at the forces that have contributed to your poor body image. The exercises in this chapter, as well as the inspiring success stories, will help you get started on this journey.
A CHEEKY RETORT
Forty-three-year-old Susan Burke was a member of a weight-loss group I led years ago. Her husband criticized her weight, especially the size of her butt. Genetically, she was wired to have a large butt; her mother and sister did, too. One day, we talked about the importance of teaching people how to talk about and treat your body regardless of your weight. This was one of the steps of developing a healthy body image. She went to her doctor that week for her yearly checkup, and he said, “Good for you! You have lost eighteen pounds, you have color in your cheeks, and your cholesterol level is down. Your workouts are really paying off. You look great.”
Later that night, while looking at herself in the mirror, Susan said to herself, He’s right, I look fit and feel better than I did in my thirties. Her husband came in and said, “What are you doing?” She told him about the good news and extensive praise from her doctor. Her husband replied, “What did he say about your ass?” She retorted, “He was busy—he didn’t have time to talk about you!”
Susan shared with the group how great she felt when she responded to her husband’s derisive comment. Her whole life, she had apologized for having a big butt—this was the first time she had stood up for her body. Instead of filling up on doughnuts in response to his remarks, she felt empowered. She went straight to bed and said to herself, This is the last time I will put up with anyone putting my body down!
Of all the factors that knock down (or build up) our body image, there are many that we can’t control, such as how we were treated as a child by our parents or peers, our cultural ideals, and any traumatic events we may have suffered. Yet we’re not completely powerless when it comes to body image barriers. The most common and most important obstacles, listed below (some of which you’ve read about briefly in chapter 2), are things that you can change and overcome—and I’ll be offering practical advice on how to do it.
BARRIER: A NEGATIVE FOCUS
Do you spend too much time criticizing your body, focusing on the negative, and ignoring the positive? You may not even be aware of this negative self-talk, in which case you’ll have to make an effort to notice how often you harbor negative thoughts about your body. Do you ever take the time to really look at your body—for example, when you get out of the shower or as you’re undressing—or do you avoid the mirror at all costs because you are disgusted with your body? Does this self-loathing drain your energy and affect your relationships at work and at home? Try the following exercises once a week for the next few months and train yourself to look at your body in a more positive light by identifying your signature body strengths. You may be resistant to doing some of these exercises, but I encourage you to give them a try. They’ve been very effective for many of my clients.
Step 1: Perform the Mirror Exercise
Find a room in your house where you can stand in front of a mirror for fifteen minutes without being interrupted. Take off your clothes or leave on only your underwear and slowly look at your body as if you’re seeing it for the very first time. Take a look at each body part in a loving and kind way. Look at your face and pay special attention to the parts of your face that you find the most attractive. Focus on these parts and admire them. Then look at the upper part of your body, including your arms, neck, and chest. Which parts of your upper body do you like? Focus on these parts and admire them. Now look at the middle section of your body, including your stomach, thighs, and buttocks. What do you like most about the middle section of your body? Focus on these things and admire them. Finally, look at the lower section of your body, including your legs, knees, and feet. What body parts do you like from the lower section of your body? Focus on them and admire their beauty.
Try to notice the beauty of different parts of your body the same way that you would focus on a loved one’s body: shapely buttocks, full breasts, curvy hips, plump lips, and so on. Remind yourself that it’s not only okay but motivating to appreciate your body as it is, even when you are in the process of trying to lose weight.
Step 2: Identify Your Signature Strengths
Now write down the pa
rts of your body that you consider attractive. For each part, think about ways that you can enhance and nurture it so that you can come to embrace and appreciate it even more. Periodically, using this format, list as many signature strengths as you can think of in a notebook or journal.
EXAMPLE
Signature strength: my muscular arms
I can take care of them by: continuing to weight train
I can embrace them by: wearing sleeveless dresses
Signature strength:__________________________________________________
I can take care of it/them by:______________________________________________
I can embrace it/them by:_____________________________________________
If you are struggling to identify your signature strengths, ask those closest to you what they find most attractive about you. Although this may sound a little strange, people who really care about us enjoy pointing out our attractive features.
Step 3: Set Healthy Body Image Goals and
Track Your Progress with an Activity Log
Learning to highlight and appreciate your strengths can make it easier to accept and work on your weaknesses. Still, changing your thinking won’t be easy. The following exercise can help you gradually break some bad habits and transform how you see your body.
Here’s how it works: Using the worksheet below (or your journal), write down a healthy body image goal you have for yourself. For instance, yours might be to eat healthfully and to feel good about your body. At the end of each day, write down the behaviors or things you did to help bring you closer to that goal. Also note where you fell short of this goal, and think of ways that you can deal with these slipups going forward in the “Negative behaviors and Action Strategies” section.