Tackling Body Shame
Last month, a few weeks before my granddaughter’s 13th birthday, I let her know that I decided to stop gushing about how pretty she looks every time I see her. I explained that this type of praise unintentionally reinforces societal programming that ties much of our self-worth to our appearance. Instead of focusing on how good she looks on the outside, I told Amada that I want to start focusing on how wonderful she is on the inside, and how happy I always feel when I see her.
While Amada took my pronouncement in stride, I’ve been shocked by how hard my decision has been to execute. As someone who’s never viewed myself as being particularly superficial, I had no idea how deeply entrenched my appearance-focused patterns were until I tried to break them.
Myra with 8-year-old Amada
Amada at 12
As I’ve worked to make this shift with my granddaughter, I’ve begun noticing how often I assess and comment on how other people look. This new awareness led me to realize that this is exactly what my mother has always done, and is still doing all the time, despite being 94 and in ill-health. It’s been quite illuminating to discover that even though I’d never even registered it before, I’d unknowingly inherited this pattern and frame of mind—one that is very common in our appearance-focused culture.
Exploring the Roots
I’ve been doing a long overdue dive into the subject of body shame in anticipation of our upcoming Quest for Eternal Sunshine free online workshop on May 20—Making Peace with Your Body, led by Andrea Wachter, a wise psychotherapist and meditation teacher who is an expert on this topic. As part of the healing process, Andrea encourages people with body shame issues to go back in time to see if they can pinpoint moments when their relationship with their body became adversarial.
The first memory I’ve identified for myself traces back to a summer in the 1970s, when I was about the same age my granddaughter is now. While sunbathing by a pool, I remember comparing myself to my friends, cataloging all ways I was less attractive and didn’t measure up. Feeling jealous of the girls with sexier figures, a desperate desire to have a “better body”—one without a short waist and wide hips—began to take hold.
Fast forward a few years, I remember being about fifteen, turning this way and that in front of a full-length mirror, judging my body incredibly harshly. Although I weighed exactly 100-pounds at 5’ 5,” I felt completely distraught over what I believed to be my embarrassingly fat hips.
Teenage Myra
My family lived in Manhattan during my teenage years, a time when my mother lacked self-control around food. To avoid temptation, the only items she kept stocked in our refrigerator were things that were neither fattening nor hard to resist: Fresca (a popular diet soda in the 1970s), farmer’s cheese (a drier version of cottage cheese), and whole heads of green cabbage.
When my sister and I left for college, at 17 and 16 respectively, we were met with unlimited quantities of food and desserts in our university cafeterias. Having never had the opportunity to learn self-regulation, we couldn’t keep ourselves from overindulging. While Ruthie gained the typical “freshman 15,” I gained 30 pounds so quickly that suddenly dozens of bright red stretch marks colonized my hips, making me even more self-conscious about my body than ever before.
Myra (left) with her sister Ruthie during their college years
Arriving home after our first semester, our mother was appalled by our weight gain. She said she didn’t even recognize the two “fat girls” who got off the plane. At her urging, we began to diet in earnest, and to burn more calories and firm up, we worked out daily with Jane Fonda via her videocassettes.
While I know our mother had our best interests at heart, for me that was the beginning of thirty years of constant dieting and a rigid schedule of harsh workouts. I even spent a full decade, from my mid-30s to mid-40s, weighing and measuring all of my food in my efforts to stay thin. Living as if I had an ever-vigilant prison guard living inside me whose job it was to keep me from straying, I rarely acknowledged, trusted or honored my body’s natural signals or desires.
Finally, in my late 40s, I threw in the towel on dieting and decided it was time to start making peace with my body, but self-acceptance has been a long and continuous journey. At almost 60, I’ve made significant progress accepting my weight and shape, but now I’m facing a whole new challenge: the wrinkles and sagging flesh that accompany aging.
Becoming a Cycle Breaker
Researching the prevalence of body shame issues, I discovered a recent poll by University of Michigan’s C.S. Mott Children’s Hospital which revealed that 73% of parents of teenage girls, and 69% of parents of teenage boys, reported that their children are insecure about their appearance—insecurity that is often accompanied by low self-esteem, a reduced willingness to participate in certain activities, and disordered eating habits. Many parents also revealed that their kids have experienced unkind treatment due to their appearance, coming from other children, teachers, health care providers, family members, and strangers.
Dr. Susan Woolford—the pediatrician who co-directed the poll—believes that to reverse this alarming trend, adults need to demonstrate an appreciation for their own bodies, no matter what they look like. “Kids are watching every time you step on the scale and sigh about needing to lose weight or point out your own perceived flaws in the mirror. Lead by example to teach them self-love and respect.”
Dr. Woolford advises people to avoid complimenting children on their physical appearance, because that reinforces the message that when someone “looks good” they are more valuable. Praise can also exacerbate a child’s worries about not looking good and make them even more self-critical.
Dr. Woolford urges adults to focus on a child’s personal qualities, as well as to constantly embrace diversity. Children can learn that people come in different sizes, shapes, colors, and with varied features. None are bad, all are just different. She also encourages adults to teach children to be critical of what they see on television and social media, explaining that many images are “perfected” and don’t accurately reflect reality.
A Portal for Deeper Healing
Learning to love and appreciate our bodies—even the parts that aren’t ascetically pleasing to us—not only makes us feel good, it can also help us be less concerned about conforming to society’s arbitrary ideals in all arenas.
Early in his healing and awakening journey, my father realized that his conditioned belief that he should be a certain way—a way that was different from who he naturally was—greatly contributed to his unhappiness, and this seems to apply perfectly to all types of self-shame. “Whenever I compare myself or my life against my ideas of perfection, I come out the loser,” he wrote. “Nothing is perfect—not my family, not my job, not my body. If I have to wait for perfection to be happy, I will surely be waiting forever.”
My father firmly believed that being judgmental is a learned behavior, and because it is learned, it can be un-learned. He paid close attention to how harshly he judged both himself and others, and with practice and repetition, he was eventually able to transform his reflexive self-criticism and self-rejection into a continuous flow of unconditional self-love, which naturally evolved into becoming more accepting of others as well.
Marea playing with her grandpa Mendek’s hair
Mendek letting his wildness shine
My father felt notably more freed and joyous when he began to prioritize self-love, self-loyalty and self-respect over external validation—when he dared to be unique and different, truly and unapologetically himself. “When I sought happiness by trying to gain other people’s approval, I could never find it, just despair and loneliness,” he wrote.
Personally, I’ve been imagining how I want to look back at my life when I’m on my deathbed, ready to depart from this body that has taken me on such a rich journey beginning in my mother’s womb. How sad would I feel if I never stopped criticizing and rejecting my body until the very end? Instead, I want to take my leave knowing I treasured my body, took good care of it, and showered it with boundless love, respect, and gratitude every single day.
Join us for Making Peace with Your Body on Saturday, May 20!
Body shame is overly prevalent and powerful in our highly appearance-focused and achievement-oriented society, which is why I’m excited to offer a free online workshop to tackle this tender topic, led by expert psychotherapist and meditation teacher, Andrea Wachter. Whether body-shame has been a lifelong issue for you, or if you simply want to overcome self-conscious feelings about anything from your hair, height, weight, skin or wrinkles, Andrea’s insights and practices are very enlightening and transformative.
In two weeks, I’ll be sharing an article I wrote for Spirituality & Health magazine featuring Andrea’s wisdom on healing from toxic body-shame programming, but in the meantime, here’s a link to an article Andrea wrote for Psychology Today, How I Stopped Hating My Body, and an interview with her on the popular Happiness Lab podcast, How to Eat Intuitively.
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