How can we build Resilience and form a better relationship with our Body in a world dominated by Diet Culture?
As a Dietitian specialising in Eating Disorders, weight concerns and Body Image, I listen to many people struggling with their relationship with their body. I hear so many hateful words that people use to describe their bodies and it always stuns me that we would never use these words to describe another person. In our diet and thin obsessed world which purports to promote health, it also strikes me that many of the messages that come across in ads, magazines, the media, images, social media, gyms, and perhaps from those around us (friends, family, colleagues) also only make us feel terrible about ourselves. The irony of this is:
“You can’t hate yourself healthy. But you can choose to treat your body with kindness, love and respect throughout your life” Rebecca Scritchfield Body Kindness
There are a number of skills that we can develop in order to help us build resilience and form a better relationship with our body in this world in which Diet culture and the pressure to be thin and beautiful is so strong. Again, as a Dietitian, I could be part of the problem in that I could offer diets and help you “fix” yourself – however I believe that this just reinforces the idea that you are not “ok” and acceptable as you are. Yes, there may be some benefit in addressing your diet and improving the quality of the food that you eat and this may lead to some weight loss. However, manipulating your diet through dietary restriction and rapidly losing weight so that you can “look better” actually only leads to poorer body image, as research shows that 1. Individuals tie their self-worth to their appearance, and 2. when weight re-gain occurs (as it does in 95% of people), one’s body image and sense of value rapidly decreases (because if your sense of value increased when you lost weight, then it must decrease when you gain weight – surely?? Well, this is how our brain tricks us.)
The skills that we can use in these challenging times are Mindfulness and Self-Compassion. These are both wonderful skills as they allow us to sit with the feelings we are experiencing, notice them, without judgement, acknowledge that they’re possibly not comfortable, encourage curiosity and personal growth and hopefully develop insight into our behaviour and who we are as individual’s.
John Kabat Zinn, simplifies Mindfulness to: “Paying attention to something, in a particular way, on purpose, in the present moment, non-judgementally”. This means that Mindfulness is a deliberate paying attention to something (thoughts, feelings, actions, tastes, noises etc) and engaging with it with curiosity rather than judgement. There is also the sense of “being with” our experiences rather than having to do something about them, or having to fix them, or react to them. Similarly, we don’t have to like our feelings or experiences – it is a process of noticing how we are feeling and being curious as to how we might have got to that point. To that end, mindfulness emphasises the process of stopping and being curious about our thoughts, feelings, emotions etc, rather than the actual outcome (of feeling better for example).
So, how exactly can Mindfulness support us in building a more positive Body Image – or as I like to say, not feel so bad about our bodies? (Because many feel that feeling positive about our bodies is too far away!). Often, we are triggered into thinking negative thoughts and feelings or taking action towards our bodies by internal and external events. Internal events can be repetitive thoughts that play over and over due to fears and worries, while external events can include seeing yourself in a reflective surface, a comment made by a friend, seeing a celebrity diet “success”, an advertisement for diet products, or even going to a health professional and worrying about an unhelpful comment being made. Often our reaction to these events is to blame and shame our bodies, and consequently want to “body fix”, that is, think we need to change our bodies – go on a diet and lose weight - in order to feel better about ourselves. However, we can’t remove all the mirrors and windows from the world, nor stop everyone talking about diets and dieting (as much as that would be awesome!), so we need to build skills to respond compassionately and kindly when we notice these thoughts popping into our heads, or when we find ourselves particularly vulnerable. Mindfulness, in these moments provides skills to help us intervene with kindness, care and respect as it invites us to insert a “pause” between the experience and the response.
Usually, what we do is have an experience (e.g., see ourselves in a shop window) and then react (e.g., think “OMG, I look horrible, I need to go on a diet”). However, what Mindfulness enables us to learn is the skill of pausing and noticing the experience – yes, we still experience seeing ourselves in the shop window and thinking “OMG, I look horrible”, but the next step is to notice the thought, pause, consider why it might be happening (e.g. I just had a fight with my partner/co-worker/best-friend/parent and feel vulnerable) and then react with kindness and compassion (e.g. “it is normal to feel sad and vulnerable after I’ve had a fight with an important person in my life.”). Mindfulness is all about reacting with curiosity – thinking and wondering “why am I feeling this or thinking this thought, that is interesting”. It is being non-judgemental about your thoughts, feelings and emotions and being able to sit with them and watch them pass.
Because we know that dieting doesn’t work to solve weight problems, reacting to negative thoughts by thinking that we need to “change ourselves” only serves to reinforce negative body image. While on the other hand, pausing and reacting with kindness can start us on the path towards some level of healing our relationship with our bodies, and hopefully also with food.
Helen Barnett (Dietitian)