Body Image: An Ongoing Battle With a Silent Killer

My dear friends, we cannot love our neighbor in freedom and grace when we only hate ourselves.

Originally published April 2016.

So many women are consumed with hours of habits, routines, and practices involving the manipulation of their bodies with the intent of one day landing within society’s tight dimensions of what is deemed to be beautiful, yet every time they wake up in the morning and drag themselves to the mirror, they are confronted with a reflection staring back at them and the all too familiar voice that whispers in their ear, “You will always fall short.” Or for others, “you will always fall too far.”

I read a heart-wrenching statistic at some point this past week that 98% of women are insecure about their physical appearance, and each of those women averages 13 negative thoughts about herself per day.

That is around one hostile thought that we send in the form of a dagger to our own hearts every single hour that we are awake.

For the 98% of us whose straight waist, curvy hips, freckly nose, pale skin, bony shoulders, blotchy skin, broad shoulders, thin hair, curly hair, big forehead, small eyes, chicken legs, love handles, big bones, skinny arms, small face, crooked smile, awkward height, flat chest, small butt, chubby cheeks, pointy chin, big ears, or whatever other specific characteristic that we believe bans us from the realm of all things beautiful, we constantly reside in a toxic state of self-hatred. We search for any reflective object throughout the day to check and see if we’ve somehow changed throughout the day. But nope, our flaws are still there.

We desperately search for an answer.

“Am I beautiful?”

That is all we want to know. But every time we ask it seems that we are told the same answer.

“No, you are not beautiful. And you will never will be.”

Even if somehow one does fall within the skinny parameters of beauty projected by mass media, if you kill yourself enough to somehow toe that fine line, I can bet that you are not satisfied and that the void in your soul is not filled. You start believing that a pretty face or a toned body is all that people see when they look at you. You believe that your physicality is all you have to offer to the world, so you offer it up for anyone to devour and abuse, and even though it hurts, the hurt that it brings is a little more tolerable because at least now you feel affirmed. Now you feel valued. Now you feel wanted.

But then you become bitter and overcompensate and spitefully resort to portraying the mentality that you don’t care what the hell society thinks about you, so you stop shaving and showering and wearing makeup out of rebellion. “I’m going to shut inside myself and make them have to seek me for what’s on the inside,” you say. But the reality of what your heart screams behind closed doors is quite different, isn’t it? Your heart lives in a constant wail for someone to come search for it, but you don’t even know how to tell someone the way in anymore because the wall you have built up around it has become so high by the stones that you so delicately placed there to protect yourself. You do not get to fulfill the desire at the core of every woman’s heart to unveil the beauty that has been placed so delicately in her soul. You push people away. You hold everyone just far enough away to see what little you bring to the surface but you hide so much deep inside because you don’t feel like you would be valued and affirmed if you brought it out.

“But Emily, isn’t it a little far-fetched to think that this is such a common thing in ALL women? Aren’t we running full speed into the era of “all bodies are beautiful?”

“Embrace your body” may be the headline of one magazine, but doesn’t the fact that the magazine cover next to it has a photo-shopped, size-0 fitness model who has just come off of a two-week water fast and works out 4 hours a day somehow prove that the struggle with body image is still nowhere close to being solved?

I feel like many women reside in one of two views of their beauty:

1) One side sees that there is a gap between their reality and the perfectionistic expectation of society, so they believe that there is no beauty to be found in them, that they will never attain that image in their minds that says “if only I can look like _______, then I will be beautiful”—a mixture of lies and truth, a mixture of past and future, a mixture of being loved and hurt, a mixture of feeling valued and nullified.

2) The other side includes those whose metabolisms and schedules just happen to fall in their favor to allow time to work out for two hours every day (that’s 14 hours a week of exercising your body… so much time..) who can get close to fitting their hips into that perfect slim size 2 and wear a bra without armpit fat or any sign of indention on their backside because there is little fat to be pushed away and have achieved “toned but not too toned,” “slim but not too slim,” “strong but not too strong.” However, even though they find themselves within the short margin of error decided by our culture, they either resort to pride—a more subtle struggle with body image that might have to wait for a later post—or they STILL struggle with their body image because THE APPEARANCE OF OUR BODIES DOES NOT SATISFY US OR GIVE US MEANING.

Why are we never satisfied?

I am no professional athlete, but my body can carry me 6 miles in an hour. I can swim for 45 minutes without stopping. I can go on an hour and a half bike ride without my heart imploding on itself. Why can’t I praise myself and be happy with the fact that my cardiovascular system is healthy enough to pump enough oxygenated blood to my muscles to sustain that kind of physical effort? Why am I instead so hard on myself because I can’t run at an 8-minute mile pace the whole time or that I have to take a break every once in a while when I swim or that my stomach still jiggles a little when I run because I can’t seem to manipulate and trick my body enough to think that it needs to get rid of the adipose tissue intentionally and biologically placed in my abdomen to prepare me to birth a child at some point during the next ten or 15 years of my life? I am not saying that aiming to lower one’s body fat percentage is a dishonorable thing to do by any means, for its obvious health benefits like lowering the risk of diabetes, heart disease, anxiety, and depression are warranted, but it is when this becomes obsessive and compulsive…when it consumes your thoughts..

That is when it becomes toxic.

As a perfectionist myself, I am never satisfied. There is always room for improvement. I can always train harder. I can run farther. I can bike longer. I can eat less. I can eat more. I can breathe deeper. I can cut more fat here. I can add more muscle there.

I. Can. Always. Do. Better. Than. I’m. Doing. Right. Now.

I have to constantly keep myself in check because my personality has a tendency to make this mentality my resting state, the lens of myself that I automatically resort to.

We shouldn’t live like this, constantly comparing ourselves and measuring ourselves by the woman next to us. We should not feel pride by her “lack of beauty” making us feel more beautiful, and we should not feel shame by her “excess of beauty” making us feel more worthless.

We know that we shouldn’t.

Yet we still do.

We try so hard to be accepting of both ourselves and the woman next to us without judgment or comparison.

Yet we don’t.

We make an effort to walk into a room without automatically sizing ourselves up against every other female to see who may be a threat to our beauty and who we may be a threat to.

Yet our efforts so often fall short.

Why are we so hostile to ourselves?

And why are we so hostile to each other?

Why must we all be compared and rated and ranked?

Why can’t we just say no more?

It is difficult as someone who has studied nothing but exercise science and nutrition for the past couple of years to separate myself from all of the hard biological and scientific facts and not obsess about them. If I don’t catch the toxic thought patterns emerging and cut them off early enough, it can get to the point where I catch myself not even being able to enjoy meals sometimes because I know that I’m consuming x amount of sugar and this many carbs and this amount of fat which pushes me over my “recommended dietary limit..” These things are helpful in moderation to be able to replenish your body after workouts and prepare your body for the next, but it is when feelings of negativity towards oneself and body overshadow the benefits of the knowing the facts that it becomes dangerous.

What is the balance between ignorance and knowledge?

Almost every food or drink item I consume, I know pretty accurately what its macronutrient percentages (carbs, fat, protein), grams of sugar, and calories are. This is helpful in becoming aware of what you are eating, but it gets frustrating when you can’t turn it off. It becomes poisonous when you get to the point where you can’t enjoy a piece of your own birthday cake without knowing that you’re consuming a fourth of your caloric allowance in one food item and already start planning on how you’re going to have to burn it off in tomorrow’s workout so that your training schedule doesn’t get messed up. BY ONE CUPCAKE? ON YOUR BIRTHDAY? Are you kidding me Em? One cupcake isn’t going to kill you and add 10 minutes to your 10k time. It sounds crazy, but when you are honest with yourself, I’m sure there are not many of you who can say that this pattern of thinking has never manifested in your life before.

This way of thinking is so unhealthy, but it is hard to keep ourselves from it when the exercise and nutrition communities now are so exclusive.

NO carb.

NO fat.

NO grains.

NO meat.

NO dairy.

NO sugar.

Really?

Never?

So that I can just feel like crap when I do because I “cheated?”

“You have no self control.”

“You have no discipline.”

“You will never achieve your goals.”

The list of hurtful things we tell ourselves goes on and on…

We would never say things like this to another human on the planet, yet we do not hesitate to shoot arrows of self-hatred at our own hearts.

Why can’t we just put the bow down already?

A significant transformative calling of Jesus is to love your neighbor as YOURSELF.

We aim to show unconditional love to those around us, but for some reason we fall short of our intention to love.

My dear friends, we cannot love our neighbor in freedom and grace when we only hate ourselves.

As someone who has struggled with food her whole life, it is exhausting having to constantly evaluate and re-evaluate where my heart and mind are when it comes to my body and how I feel about it. Am I insecure? If so, what lies am I believing and what is their source? How do I cut the weed off at its root?

Do I feel good about my body? If I do, is it too much? Am I prideful? Do I find affirmation in the fact that I have a slim waist? Am I idolizing my body? Do I search for identity in how toned my shoulders are and how firm my stomach is, or do I work out because I’m working toward a goal for the sake of accomplishing something like doing an Olympic distance triathlon?

Do I want to burn calories because I want to be healthy, because I want to take advantage of this season of life where my body can carry me over miles of rugged terrain to climb a mountain, or survive through an hour or two of pounding on my knees on a long-distance run through beautiful mountain trails or use the pull ups that I do on a bar in a gym to help me do the things I love doing outside like climbing tall trees and holding my body to a boulder as I climb it so that I don’t fall into a river?

Or do I want to burn calories in order to see a number on the scale drop or to see inches cut away?

I feel like every woman thinks that she is the only one that struggles with insecurity about her body, so she never talks about it. She never speaks the tension that wells in her spirit when she looks in the mirror or how she feels like she is not enough every time she is in a room with other women. But then, every time one of us is finally vulnerable and admits to it, it is like a wave of relief washes over the room because finally everyone does not feel alone anymore. I just don’t understand why if we all feel this way, why we aren’t talking about it. Is it because we are constantly told by society that we have to be “okay” and strong and confident all the time? Is it because we’re scared we are going to be found out? That people will know we “struggle” with something?

I say that’s garbage.

I’m training for an olympic triathlon. I’m in the best shape of my life.

YET I STILL STRUGGLE WITH LOVING MY BODY.

When people look to you to provide answers, it is hard to know what to say when one of your greatest insecurities is rooted in the same issue. If anything, it just rubs it in my face even more that I should be more confident than I am.

But I’m not.

So what do I do with that?

Shame and criticize myself for not being more secure in my body/outward appearance?

Try harder at the gym so that maybe I’ll eventually get to the “ideal weight?” (DISCLAIMER**There is no ideal weight. Each step closer to the ideal weight only makes the number decrease… it continues to be unattainable because we are never satisfied. Because we cannot be satisfied by something so physical and of the flesh.)

No, for this does not bring me life but only silently sucks energy from my spirit.

When are we going to understand that looking a certain way is not going to make us feel affirmed and beautiful?

According to society, I’ve gotten pretty close to what “beauty” is supposed to look like physically, and let me tell you,

IT IS NOT THE ANSWER.

I want to give you the freedom that comes upon hearing a simple phrase:

“Me too.”

Are you insecure? Do you hate your body? Are you one of the 98%? Do you shoot 13 hurtful arrows at your own heart every day? Do the words of this post resonate with you? Do they pick at the scabs of old wounds that haven’t fully healed? Do they make you want to cry? Do they make you angry?

Yes?

Me too.

So let’s start talking about it.

______________________________________________

Cheers to the Journey, and may your Spirit always reside in a state of wonder.