Growing Your Relationship With Your Body in Eating Disorder Recovery
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There’s a common saying in eating disorder recovery: “Body image comes last.” Many ED survivors find they have a much easier time learning how to eat consistently and use new coping skills than learning to appreciate their bodies. Developing a positive relationship with your body is a slower, trickier journey. A meal plan comes with concrete instructions, but changing body image can feel like uncharted territory, and what works for one person may not be as helpful for someone else. That being said, difficult does not mean impossible, and while the growth may be slow, many survivors come to enjoy a loving, kind relationship with their bodies. In honor of National Eating Disorder Awareness week, here are some strategies for growing this relationship.
Strategy 1: Body Appreciation
Shifting your focus from what your body looks like to what it can do can foster a sense of gratitude and warmth towards the body. We can hold the dialectic that our bodies may not look the way that we’d want, but they allow us to experience the world. Think about all the ways in which your body enables you to do the things you love. Can you cultivate gratitude towards your arms for letting you embrace your partner or friends, even if they aren’t as toned as you’d want? Can you appreciate how your legs let you play a game of soccer and walk along the beach at sunrise? This thankfulness can provide a helpful counterbalance to automatic negative body image thoughts.
A note: body appreciation can be more complicated for those with chronic illness or disabilities. It may be much more difficult (although not impossible) to hold gratitude while grieving the ways in which your body has lost abilities or carries pain. For those living with chronic conditions, our next strategy may provide a gentle way to ease into body appreciation.
Strategy 2: Mindfulness
Photo by Inga Gezalian on Unsplash
Our image-obsessed culture can make us experience our bodies as objects to be looked at, critiqued, and evaluated. For example, when eating a delicious piece of chocolate cake, we might picture how we look while eating the cake and begin worrying about a bulge in our cheek or the hunch of our back, rather than enjoying the flavors and texture of the cake. Similarly, many people find that they cannot focus on the pleasurable sensations of sex because they can’t stop picturing the folds of their belly or other perceived flaws. Drawing deliberate attention to your other senses through mindfulness can break that pattern of looking at your body instead of being in your body. The next time you get dressed, try to wait a few minutes before looking in the mirror. Draw your attention to how the fabrics feel against your skin—are they smooth, soft, textured, or fuzzy? What feels pleasant or unpleasant? Or try this exercise in the shower: if you feel comfortable, turn off the lights and leave a lit candle to navigate. Do you notice the warmth of the water against your skin and the perfumes of your soap and shampoo? When we use mindfulness to pull focus to our senses, we train our brain that our body is a way to experience pleasure, and we get ourselves out of our heads and into the present world.
Strategy 3: Change your idea of beauty
American culture has a long-standing habit of picking a particular kind of body—always a white, abled, cisgender, relatively thin one—and raising it up as the definition of beauty. That definition has often varied between time periods, but it always holds up existing power structures. Beauty is political, and beauty is also subjective and personal. The next time you find yourself ruminating on how your body does not meet the current beauty standard, take a pause and question how you feel about this standard. Do you really agree that thinner bodies are more valuable, or do you believe that all bodies have value by virtue of being human? How much of the beauty standard do you truly find attractive, and how much of it feels disposable or unimportant to you? It can be helpful to adjust your social media feed to include more diverse bodies and to find diverse artistic depictions of beauty to support this perspective shift.
Strategy 4: Self-compassion
Lastly, perhaps the most consistently helpful strategy for changing your relationship with your body is a big dose of self-compassion. I’ve often seen eating disorder survivors become frustrated with themselves for still struggling with their feelings about their bodies years after other ED symptoms have faded or disappeared. I want to emphasize that this is perfectly normal. Our culture does not support a loving, accepting relationship with our bodies, and it can be exhausting to constantly fight against that current. Even for those with fairly happy relationships with their bodies, it’s normal to have bad days or rough patches. The next time you get frustrated with yourself for struggling with body image, remind yourself that this is a nearly universal experience and that it’s normal and okay to not feel great about your body. Validate that this work is hard and takes a long time, and don’t push away the feelings of sadness, shame, anger, and fear—it makes sense to experience them when your brain learned to treat your body as the problem in order to cope. Offer yourself kindness and support as you continue on this difficult but ultimately rewarding journey.