Body and Shame, Part III

The message that needs promotion in our culture is that girls’ and women’s self-esteem cannot be connected to body and weight. If image and looks are the most important elements of a woman and if thinness continues to be glorified, then dieting will still be a rite of passage for adolescent girls and eating disorders will continue to be an intractable problem. 

Despite the sentiment that girls are capable of choosing any profession—that they can have it all—they continue to be burdened by anachronistic mores about appearance. The two cannot exist together without severe consequences. In fact, the drive for thinness only weakens the growth of a girl or woman because the energy consumed by dieting and weight detracts from attention needed to build a full life. 

By and large, men don’t have this problem. Some men do have eating disorders and body image issues that largely revolve around the fat phobia pervasive in our society, also a pressing and important issue. But they aren’t trapped behind sexist expectations that a woman prioritize image over everything else. 

The media has created an ideal for women in recent decades of extreme thinness and a photoshopped perfect body. In other words, not only is thinness a goal, but the objective is unattainable. The drive for thinness is inevitably a setup for failure. So the result of focusing on weight is shame and failure. And that is how a significant number of women experience themselves day in day out. 

There is a growing chorus of angry women’s voices expressing outrage about the shackles of thinness and weight. From the body positive movement to the concept of intuitive eating to the food coaching movement, younger people are listening to influencers who making a difference. These voices need to penetrate communities where dieting is a part of every 13 year old girl’s development and be sure the overwrought fears of obesity don’t scare people away.

These voices need to make clear the risks of spending a lifetime suffering in shame. These voices need to make clear that all body shapes are healthy and ok. These voices need to remind everyone what is truly valuable in life.

The Root Cause of Body Image Distortion

These last two posts outlined some of the causes of body image distortion and how one’s mind can latch onto these self-images. The power of negative body image feels like a truth, a rite of passage passed down from mothers to daughters or within communities.

Because this component of eating disorders is a culturally accepted norm, changing the root of the distortion is exponentially more difficult. The outside world continues to state that thinness is a virtue, if not an accomplishment. Among women, telling one another “you look like you’ve lost weight” is still the ultimate compliment.

The task for the clinician of convincing a patient that the goal of thinness, a central part of society, is somehow false is a tall order. A therapist may be able to work against eating disorder thoughts that tell people to starve or binge and purge, but it’s a much more difficult goal to contradict the belief that women need to focus on weight loss as a sign of success.

This contradiction comes up in recovery very regularly. Even the most educated and supportive families struggle not to question their child’s meal plan and become afraid of too much weight gain. Even after years of watching their family member suffer with an eating disorder, the overall pressure for thinness can often override a person’s general health and wellness.

The drive for thinness leads to dieting, the most significant risk factor for developing an eating disorder, and also makes recovery more difficult because of the pressure not to gain weight, even if that’s necessary to get well. Trapped on both sides, people often feel most stuck because of body image distortion in their recovery. This is the last element of the illness that gets better.

Ultimately, body image distortion will only change when the cultural norm changes, something well beyond the lone clinician’s ability. This focus on weight remains a curse in our lives and especially women’s lives. Nothing will change unless the people most affected find a way to band together and insist on those changes. Life has to be more important than weight.