I used to enjoy asking and thinking about the question, “If you could change one thing about your body, what would it be?” Often my friends and I would have trouble picking just one thing. We had long lists of dissatisfactions with our body image.

Most people, if you ask them, have some degree of negative body image, something they wish they could change about their body or feel is deficient or horrible about their body. These feelings and thoughts cause us so much emotional pain and often physical pain as we pursue extreme methods of trying to change our bodies. Not to mention the untold amounts of money we spend and giant industries devoted to the dream of a “better” body.

How can we begin to let go of a negative body image? As it happens, Wikihow has a fantastic overview and list of tools for healing a negative body image (https://www.wikihow.health/Deal-with-a-Negative-Body-Image). It’s a multi-faceted approach, including noticing and dealing with emotions and emotional triggers, noticing and transforming our thoughts, and noticing and embracing positive body image ideas. I’ll refrain from duplicating all that info here, but invite you to check out that awesome post.

Here I want to focus on what I see as a strong cause of negative body image and a common denominator among all my clients who struggle with this, and that is Messages – from Media and Others. No one is born with a negative body image; it is learned, and we can start to recognize all the messages we receive from outside ourselves, telling us that somehow our bodies are not good enough as they are. From very young we start to hear messages about what body traits are desirable or undesirable, just in everyday conversation. As we get older, media joins in. A constant flow of messages telling us and “showing” us how we “should” look. And woe is the poor being who doesn’t look like that.

I invite you to simply start to notice all the messages about body image – media images, comments of others, implicit beliefs about body image that flow in conversations. Start to notice how the messages are constant, how they are shoved in our faces and down our throats in a nonstop implication of “You’re not good enough!” I will not ask you to challenge or disavow the messages right away – there’s a lot of conditioning that might be hard to break. But I will invite you to imagine yourself as a young child, being forced to swallow these negative beliefs and ideas, and to have compassion for sweet you. Your negative body image is not your fault, and you can start to notice how the Messages are hurting sweet you. You don’t deserve it.