Step 5 of 10 · Make Peace With Food
Making Peace With All Foods
Making Peace With All Foods
Step 5 · 12 min
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How do you see yourself when you look in a mirror?
Not what the mirror actually shows. What do you see?
For many people, what they see when they look in the mirror is not an accurate reflection. It is filtered through a lifetime of messages about what a body should look like — and it bears only a partial relationship to objective reality.
Body image is a mental construction. And mental constructions can be changed.
Body image is not about what your body actually looks like — it is a mental representation
Body image disturbance: CBT model — distorted perception + avoidance + checking behaviours
Body neutrality vs. body positivity: the more achievable path for most people
Functionality appreciation: what the body does vs. how it looks
Body image — the mental picture a person has of their body, along with the feelings, thoughts, and behaviours associated with it — is shaped by far more than genetics or appearance. Research by Thomas Cash and others identifies it as a multidimensional construct, influenced by early family messages, media exposure, peer experiences, developmental events, and cultural norms.
Critically: body image is not correlated with objective body size or shape as strongly as people assume. Thin people can have severely negative body image; people whose bodies don't conform to cultural ideals can have genuinely positive body image. What determines body image is primarily the cognitive and emotional framework through which the body is viewed, not the body itself.
Body image disturbance, in the CBT model developed by Christopher Fairburn, involves three maintaining factors: avoidance (not looking at the body, wearing concealing clothes), checking (frequent mirror-checking, pinching, measuring), and mental filtering (attending selectively to disliked features while ignoring the whole).
Body positivity — the movement to love and celebrate all bodies — is genuinely valuable at a cultural level but can be difficult to access individually when the starting point is significant negativity. Body neutrality — a term popularised by Anne Poirier and others — proposes a more accessible middle ground: not requiring love of the body, but releasing the need to evaluate it constantly. The body is where you live. It is not your primary project.
Functionality appreciation — focusing on what the body does rather than how it looks — has strong research support for improving body image: noticing that your legs carry you, your hands create things, your lungs breathe, your heart keeps beating.
Find a comfortable position · Read slowly
Functionality appreciation practice:
Take one minute and list five things your body did for you today — not how it looked, but what it functioned.
It breathed without being asked. It digested food. It carried you somewhere. It enabled a sensation of pleasure. It kept you upright.
Offer it a moment of genuine acknowledgement for this, independent of how it looks.
Then: notice any critical body thoughts that arise today. Simply name them: "there is a critical body thought." Don't argue with them. Just don't automatically believe them either.
Your body is not your adversary. It is doing its best, all the time, without credit. Today, give it some.