Treating Your Body with Kindness

Treating Your Body with Kindness

Treating your body with kindness is a critical first step of improving your body image. Body image is
defined by how you think and feel about your body. These beliefs and expectations for your body can be influenced by many factors including society’s beauty ideal and diet culture. Diet culture tells us that
bodies are something we need to perfect rather than embrace. According to Christy Harrison, MPH, RD, CEDRD and author of Anti-Diet, diet culture “worships thinness and equates it to health and moral virtue, which means you can spend your whole life thinking you’re irreparably broken just because you don’t look like the impossibly thin ‘ideal’.” This can result in body hatred or body dissatisfaction, which are risk factors for dieting and eating disorders. It is helpful to think about body image as a spectrum, starting with body hatred, body dissatisfaction, body respect, body neutrality, body peace and lastly body love. Body respect is a commitment to no longer bullying or abusing your body every day. In order to work towards body neutrality, there needs to be a level of acceptance of your body’s biologically determined weight, shape and features. Both are rooted in kindness. Body kindness is choosing to be gentle and compassionate with your body despite how you feel about it that day. You don’t need to love it to treat it with kindness. If you are not sure where to start, try finding gratitude in what it does for you each day. Work to change the inner dialog in your head about your body by making it less critical. Prioritize self-care and your body’s basic needs of rest, enjoyable movement and initiative eating. This means nourishing your body with foods you enjoy.

Additionally, try to avoid comparisons to people and social media images, abstain from body checking behaviors (any way that you critically evaluate your weight or shape), and buy clothes that fit instead of focusing on the size. Make a commitment to yourself to start with one small form of kindness today.