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Body Image Concerns and Disturbances
Mini-Articles
You Can Never Be Too Rich or Too Thin...Wrong
Tips for Having a "Better Body"
BDD: Body Dysmorphic Disorders
Figure Flaw Obsessions
Create a Health Body Image in Your Child
Body Image Concerns and Disturbances
You Can Never Be Too Rich or Too Thin...Wrong:
It says a lot that most fashion models are thinner than 98% of American women.
- The female body's best barometer of appropriate weight is its menstrual cycle. The monthly cycle should be a regular phenomenon without the aid of regulatory pills.
- Psychologically, this impossible quest to be ever thinner results in feelings of inadequacy, guilt and self-hate, along with anger and self-deprivation.
- In actual fact, body image satisfaction has less to do with how much a person weighs, and more to do with the health of a person's self-esteem. When fat or large people are physically fit, they are likely to be in better physical condition than excessively thin people.
- Look for true health, fitness and ultimately, longevity, in how your body works for you, not in how it looks. Here's a case where "form over function" does not apply.
Tips for Having a "Better Body"
Speak of "better bodies," and what's the first thing that comes to mind? Invariably, people think of how bodies look; they think of weight, shape, size and form. We would all do well to think of the "better" in better bodies as referring to how our bodies function, as much as how they look.
Appearance is only one small part of what it takes to make a body better.
- People who suffer from eating disorders typically look as though they are in terrifc shape.....firm, muscular, fat-free and willowy.
- What people do not see is the anxiety and depression that underlie these dysfunctions, and that take their toll in compulsions around food and exerice in the effort to maintain these "perfect" bodies.
- A better body is a body that works effectively for the individial both now and in the future.
- A better body is one that can reproduce, can grow strong and lasting bones, and that houses a brain that can think and learn optimally, exercise good judgment and resolve life's problems efectively?
- How many young women realize that having a normal menstrual period, brought on naturally by the forces of healthful internal functioning, lies at the very core of a "better" body and a healthier, happier life?
Better bodies are the result of healthy eating, and a healthy lifestyle around self-care. Healthy eating has nothing to do with food restriction,dieting, or thinness!
BDD: Body Dysmorphic Disorder
More than one-third of all females between the ages of 15 and 39 suffer from BDD. This disorder is evident when preoccupation with body appearance (especially when the preoccupation is specifically with one area) interferes with social, career, sexual, and personal relations and activities. BDD is a body image disturbance about self-loathing and body intolerance. All of these conditions put a person at high risk to develop eating disorders.
The whys and wherefores? Various elements in the individual's external and internal environments come together in the context of genetic susceptibilities and temperament. In these cases, the whole can be greater and more devastating than the sum of its parts. The question why is far less significant than what to do to alleviate the emotional pain that BDD carries with it.
Here are three pivotal ways to diminish and alleviate BDD problems:
- Become aware that problems with one's outer appearance symbolize internal emotional problems that have yet to be addressed. Identify the underlying driving factors and address them in therapy.
- Learn to know and love your body in ways that you never knew existed. Experience the elegance of optimal bodily function through yoga, or the Feldenkrais Method of bodily awareness and re-imaging. Form soon begins to pale next to the sensation of optimal bodily function.
- Expand the universe of your mind's eye to see beyond your own borders. Become involved in volunteering or community work that creates goodness and well being on a broader scale beyond the self. Learn to love yourself, even as others will begin to love you and the positive impact you make on their lives.
Figure Flaw Obsessions
Surely, you have heard about the damaging messages of the media that surround us, the statistics about fashion models being thinner than 98 percent of the American women and girls who view them, and the work of Anne Becker who did research on the Fiji Islands proving that when American television came on the scene in the South Pacific, a number of years ago, the rate of anorexia sky rocketed among viewers of the American sit-coms broadcasted.
Why? My sense is that eating and thinness has become a primary means by which the American public has learned to deal with, sublimate, or otherwise distract themselves from feelings of anxiety. Why are females so anxious these days? Increasingly, younger girls who reach puberty at earlier ages experience the conflict of the demands of nature v. those of society. Society tells young women to grow smaller, even as they grow older and their bodies prepare to reproduce and carry on the species.
Once grown, women become increasingly anxious about their weight because the more they diet, the less efficient function they get from their metabolisms, which slow down to a snails pace to help the body survive in the face of nutrient deprivation. Some food restrictors gain weight on eating minimal numbers of calories.
Create a Health Body Image in Your Child
Parental messages about body image are most profoundly positive when parents maintain a healthy emotional connection with their growing child, along with their own healthy attitude towards eating, and sense of their own body.
Parents must:
- Model a healthy relationship with food.
- Educate children, teaching them to regard the body as a wise and predictable machine requiring fuel and maintenance, rather than as an object of beauty; to regard food as a life-sustaining fuel rather than as the enemy; to regard healthy eating as a balanced and moderated lifestyle rather than as an exercise in food restriction.
- Listen to “know” their child, and to help their child understand herself, and to respond. When the child makes negative comments about her shape or size, parents must not be dismissive even if the child's rears seem irrational; rather, they should start a discussion about how your child thinks she could look better and why.
- Help the child develop immunity to the steady stream of media messages that distort her perspective by teaching her to become a more critical consumer of the media, and by canceling subscriptions to fashion magazines.
- Become aware of their body image concerns and attitudes that may stimulate their child’s fears, distortions and misconceptions. Parents must be careful not to complain about their own weight.
About Abigail H. Natenshon
Abigail H. Natenshon, MA LCSW has been a psychotherapist in private practice specializing in the treatment of eating disordered individuals and their families for the past 28 years. She is co-founder and director of Eating Disorder Specialists of Illinois; A Clinic without Walls, and the author of When Your Child Has an Eating Disorder: A Step-by-Step Workbook for Parents and Other Caregivers (Jossey Bass, San Francisco, October, 1999). Visit her web sites at www.empoweredparents.com and www.empoweredkidZ.com
CONTACT:
Abigail Natenshon, MA, LCSW
Telephone 847-432-1795
Fax: 847-266-9233
Highland Park, Illinois 60035
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