(Originally appeared in Sense and Psychotherapy, Spring 2000)

Grudgingly or not, most of us bow to the dictates of fashion. By day, week, season and year, we modify our clothes, our hair, our makeup according to society’s notions of what’s professional, beautiful, practical. Our bodies though, always seem to have minds of their own. Too short, too tall, curving where they should flatten, growing wrinkles, losing hair, they defy our best efforts to mold them to the current look. Maintaining a positive body image under these conditions is a constant struggle. Yet, the degree to which we’re able to do so, to actually enjoy with each passing moment the physical experience of living in our imperfect bodies, is a significant determinant of our emotional well-being.

I’ve long been interested in the importance of body image: how it develops, how its impacted by our environment, how it affects the way we carry and ultimately feel about ourselves. We’re continually bombarded with messages pointing out all our physical imperfections, messages that equate how we look with who we are and then tell us where and how to spend our money to fix ourselves. Our worship of physical attractiveness even corrupts our notions of physical health. Anorexia and bulimia are extreme forms of attitudes many of us carry about exercise and eating that have more to do with changing the way we look than maintaining and enhancing our physical and emotional health.

Of course, we all know how to conjure the right words, seeming platitudes like “beauty is only skin deep”, or “real beauty lies in the heart”, but how do we get ourselves to truly believe them? Somehow, we have to create a sense of acceptance and comfort in our own bodies so that we can shrug off, rather than become enslaved by, our society’s notions of what we “should” look like. We need to find a way to create an enduring commitment to maintaining a healthy life-style, one that recognizes and embraces its most fundamental benefits to our long-term physical and emotional well-being, benefits that we can experience every day.

I believe that a good place to start is by exploring our own body image, and how we came to it. How were we handled as children? How much attention did we receive for looks? for cleverness? for athletic prowess? How much freedom or encouragement did we get for taking physical risks, and how much emphasis was placed on physical activity, particularly for its intrinsic enjoyment? By taking conscious stock of how we came to our present image, we can begin to take control of that image and perhaps point it in a more positive direction.

One of the most commonly cited qualities of people with positive body image is, paradoxically, that they tend to place relatively less importance on how they look. They seem to have a sense of physical comfort in their bodies that arises from their ability to enjoy the acts and feelings their bodies are capable of. Body image thus lies much more at the core of their being, and has relatively little to do with “attractiveness”. For many of us, this is a radical shift in perspective, but I believe it has the potential not only to create a much more positive body image, but give us back the pleasure that each of us can, and should, take in our bodies.