This week is Mental Health Awareness week and the theme is body image. Body image issues can affect anyone and at any stage in life and social media has played a big part in causing a lot of people to worry about their body image.
Our body image is what we reflect and how we feel when we look in the mirror or when we picture ourselves in our minds.
Body image issues can be about appearance and what you think about your body, such as your weight, height, colour. It can be how you feel within your own skin and it may be positive or negative.
Today, I am choosing to use my own experience in this topic as someone that has struggled with my own body image.
The picture above is of me and my son, four years apart.
In those 4 years, life has happened; mental health problems, losses and gains for both of us, as well as embarking on the long road to recovery.
Of-course I don’t do myself any favours by sharing pictures with those that I care about and think feel the same.
These pictures were compared in this way, with the caption ‘what happened to you’.
The first one was at my sons 18th and we were happy.
The second one he was 22, on his graduation and and we were happy.
I said I didn’t understand, and they said; ‘well you have clearly put on a lot of weight from the last picture. What have you been doing to yourself? Surely you can work hard at looking like that again if you made the effort’.
Then it clicked; our milestones didn’t matter to them, it was the way I looked that they were interested in. And then it really started to bother me.
The extra pounds that I have gained over the years started to feel like hundreds, I started to ask myself if I could look better. But better than who? Better than what?
I had allowed someone to judge me by a picture, to justify myself to someone why I didn’t look the way they expected me to and it really did affect me, to the point that my self-confidence started to wane.
It took me a long time to recover from that, but I had to remind myself how far I had come in my recovery to allow that to affect me for too long.
When we continuously worry about how we look it can impact our self-esteem and confidence, and the media has a strong influence on what we think the standard body should look like.
Looking at ‘perfect’ pictures of others and then comparing them to ourselves only leads us to feel worse about ourselves and it is a practice that we need to stop.
When people are constantly plagued with negative thoughts and feelings about their bodies their likelihood to develop certain mental health conditions, such as eating disorders, depression and anxiety is high.
A negative body image may also lead to low self-esteem, which can affect many areas of your life and you may start to obsess constantly about what you eat, how much you exercise or even avoid certain people; but there are steps that you can take to develop a healthier body image.
The more you practice thinking positive thoughts about yourself and the fewer negative thoughts you have about your body, the better you will feel about who you are and how you look.
Working on accepting how you look is healthier than constantly working to change how you look. Always be kind to yourself and accept that a healthy body image is good for a healthy mind.
