Do You Love Your Body?

“Beauty is not long hair, skinny legs, tanned skin or perfect teeth. Believe me. Beauty is the face of who cried and now smiles, beauty is the scar on your knee since you fell when you were a kid, beauty is the circles when love doesn’t let you sleep, beauty is the expression on the face when the alarm rings in the morning, it’s the melted makeup when you have a shower, it’s the laughter when you make a joke you’re the only one who can understand, beauty is meeting his gaze and stopping understanding, beauty is your gaze when you see him, it’s when you cry for all you paranoias, beauty is the lines marked by time. Beauty is what we feel in the inside which also shows outside us. Beauty is the marks the life leaves on us, all the kicks and the caresses the memories leave us. Beauty is letting yourself live.” – Emma Watson

For the next few months, I will be writing a series of posts about healing your relationship with food, your body, and yourself. This is the first of these posts. Today we are focusing on identifying how your Body Shame presents itself. As the months progress, you can always go here for more entries on this topic.

Do you love your body?

I’m guessing your answer is somewhere between: sometimes or certain parts to nope, never, none of it – otherwise you wouldn’t be here. There are many factors that can contribute to Body Shame. We will be diving more into which of those factors affected you as we move through this journey together. You’ll get to discover your story and answer some key questions: What happened to you in your past that made you feel this way about your body and yourself? How did you get to where you are today? Maybe it was media influence, teasing when you were a child, your mother’s dieting, constant exposure to Barbie or Bratz, or photoshopped images of the ‘ideal’ man or woman in the media.

There are myriad reasons why you are here. Truth be told: there’s likely no one reason. Poor relationships with food, our bodies, and ourselves tend to develop from a perfect storm of events, of feeling that you weren’t good enough, weren’t thin enough, or didn’t look “right.”

Source: Dollar Photo, used with permission

Today we are going to dive into your pain points. Warning: this will not be easy because to heal your Body Shame, we have to dive into your Body Shame – pick it apart, see where it came from, what it looks like, how it manifests itself. It may not be fun or pretty, but it is an important part of the healing journey.

I’d like you to take Evans and Dolan’s Body Satisfaction Questionnaire. Is it perfect? No. Does it cover every situation you may have experienced? No. But it’s a good start to really discern how your Body Shame shows up and how it may be affecting your life right now.

In this questionnaire, I am asking you to reflect on how you felt about your appearance in the last four weeks. It asks you questions about dieting, feeling “fat”, being too full, or comparing yourself to other women or media models. Warning: your Inner Mean Girl (Inner Critic) may surface today. Take a deep breath if that happens. I don’t want you to get down on yourself or take this little assessment and go into blame, shame or judgment mode. That’s not the goal.

I want you to be honest with yourself and to take the assessment with the attitude of, “Huh. Would you look at that?” No blame. No shame. No judgement allowed. Just be raw, real, and vulnerable. Why? Because you need to figure out where you are right now in order to heal your relationship with your body.

It may be tough. Do not freak out if you have a high score (above 70) on this scale. That’s okay. There’s no right or wrong answer here. Show yourself a little bit of compassion as you take this. Be honest with yourself. Let’s see where you’re coming from. What has the last month been like for you in terms of your relationship with your body? Next week we will continue our journey into understanding where your Body Shame came from and what it looks like so you can focus on healing. In the meantime, show yourself a little Body Love today.

Go here to take the survey: www.psyctc.org/tools/bsq/doc/bsq-16b.doc and here to learn more about the BSQ: http://www.psyctc.org/tools/bsq/