Body Image and Happiness
As a teenager growing up in the 1980’s, I was hyper-aware of my weight. Looking back now, I realize that I was never fat, but I always thought I was. Like many other teenage girls at the time, I was constantly worried about being overweight. I was fortunate in that I never worried so much that I engaged with dangerous or unhealthy diets, but many young women around my age were not so lucky.
Eating disorders were “in vogue” when I was a teen and young woman. While most of us who grew up hearing about girls with anorexia and/or bulimia now understand how dangerous these disorders are, at the time it was actually “cool” to talk about having anorexia. We would call someone “anorexic” if she was just a bit skinnier than normal, but we didn’t really know the dangers hidden beneath true eating disorders.1
What I learned as an adult is that anorexia and bulimia are rooted in severe body image distortions. Beautiful young women in our day believed they were fat even when they were dangerously thin and this caused them to refuse to eat (in the case of anorexia) or to binge eat and force themselves to purge afterward (in the case of bulimia).
I can’t say exactly what caused the trend of eating disorders at the time except that I’m sure the constant parade of dangerously thin women on TV and in magazines was a significant factor in making normal-sized girls and teens believe they were grossly overweight.2
For a very long time — perhaps into my 50’s — I still believed I was overweight even though I’d long since conquered my true weight issues after a single and brief bout of overeating and dieting in my late 20’s.
During adulthood my body image issues were not limited to my weight. I was convinced that my breasts were too small and my hips were too large. I considered having surgery to give me the voluptuous breasts that I imagined would somehow make me not only attractive to men, but would somehow make me love my body. If I added a bit of liposuction to my hips and tummy, I’d be perfect, I deduced.3
I seriously considered having plastic surgery (as it was called in my day) for decades. I dreamed about how I would look afterward. I imagined the dramatic, positive ways in which it would change my life. There were times when I was so convinced that I needed to modify my body surgically that I never considered that it might be my impression of myself that was in error rather than my body itself.
As a 58 year-old woman with gray hair and wrinkles, my body image issues are much different today. I am aware that I don’t have the thick, straight hair that used to drive me crazy with its weight and volume. After a few years of growing out my natural gray, I decided to continue covering it with a subtle blonde color.
I don’t like my wrinkles and when a young person calls me “Ma’am” or gives me a look reserved only for folks of their grandparents’ age, I really don’t like my wrinkles! ;)
I’ve always been shorter than I would prefer and there are plenty of ways in which I would change my physical body if God granted me unlimited body wishes. Despite all of that, however, I have come to love my body more, not less, as I age.
What I’ve realized is that no matter what I look like, someone else will be prettier, thinner, and more beautiful. Even if I win the World’s Most Beautiful Woman4 contest, there will be folks who think someone else should have won. There is truly no winning in the body image game.
It’s been said that beauty is in the eye of the beholder but what we often fail to realize is that the only eye that matters is our own. Even if I am short, overweight, gray, and wrinkly, it is my own perception of these “facts” that create the most impact in my being happy (or not) with my body.
As with most aspects of our happiness journey, the answer lies not “out there” but inside of us. While it’s fine to want to lose a few pounds or to cover our gray, when we find ourselves obsessing about what’s wrong with our bodies, we can be assured that searching for acceptance somewhere outside of ourselves will never lead to the happiness that we imagine.
Youth and beauty are always fleeting, but learning how to love ourselves regardless of the current state of our physical bodies is a skill worth mastering. Your value extends far beyond your physical likeness and when you finally realize that simple (but perhaps not easy to accept) fact, you will suddenly find yourself wondering why you have wasted so much time fretting and not enough time enjoying your wonderful self just as it is.
The wake-up call for many of us was when Karen Carpenter, a very popular singer of our day, lost her body-image battle to complications of anorexia nervosa at the age of 32.
Perhaps I should be grateful to my brother for hogging our only TV to watch sports when I was a kid. Even though it annoyed me then, I suspect that my limited TV watching was a significant factor in my never going overboard with body image issues in my teens.
I effectively ignored the “minor” detail that I was “too short” because there was no plastic surgery for that. ;)
Men also have body image issues, though the details are different. Some of these issues are rooted in our biology (e.g., men need to be seen as strong to attract the best mate) but, just as for women, the media’s barrage of messages “tell” men in which ways they don’t measure up.