We live in a world of perfection, regardless of our age or body style, what we all want is to look our best, better, to improve or enhance our body image to its peak.
We live in a society of peer pressure, as we’re forced, shamed into eating the proper foods, using that exact designer diet, directing a narrow more defined profile of what beauty should be and look like.
Then the majority of us will go to war to combat this by attempting to tailor what our bodies should be, and will then begin sweating away to lose that extra weight for that desired look. All this in the attempts to improve our body image and to please others.
Women in particular are faced with body image issues which becomes difficult because of their constantly changing shapes throughout their lives. There’s always concern when looking in the mirror regarding what it looks like.
It also unfortunately begins much too early in life, which is as soon as these young girls become aware of the development of their bodies.
Much of this is contributed by the constant hounding by the media and its stand and glorification that it takes in their demand that everyone should be thin and beautiful. Then these girls begins to feel extremely vulnerable and self conscious of these messages and images.
They’ll begin to view and judge themselves whether to see if they fit into that idealized profile or not, a tendency which usually becomes worse as they begin to hit adolescence, and then adulthood.
This turns into a point of peak identity development once these emerging adults begin formulating an overall sense of what they should look like. They become aware of how their bodies fit in with others in society, which defines who they are.
Steps To Developing Better Body Image
• Self Affirmation – It can begin with better positive self talk which may be the key to improving body image. This to challenge the usually distorted thought patterns, applying daily affirmations can help and be the key.
If you’ve had years of negative messages regarding your body, these statements needs to be counteracted with positive messages on a daily basis, even several times a day.
These self affirmations along with self care should also encompass healthy nutrition as well as physical activity, this instead of getting nutritional guidance from those rigid diet regimens.
Try educating yourself better on the various food groups, control your portion sizes, and incorporate these various food items into your daily meal plan.
Exercising, participating in an effective physical fitness plan which includes cardio, doesn’t need to be a cumbersome daunting routine. Begin by doing activities which you actually enjoy.
• Talking About It More – Positive self talk along with conversations with others can be an important step towards better healthier body image. Begin paying more attention to the dialogue which you have with others, your friends, co-workers, and your family including kids.
It always appears that topics which are based on diets, food, and weight issues will always creep into any discussion, which only adds to the body conscious obsessions. So try to change the conversation by discussing more interesting topics, rather than always talking about fat all the time.
Continuous negative self talk is a poison arrow to your self-esteem and the majority of them stems out of your own awareness. So begin paying more attention to how you constantly or negatively examine yourself.
Evaluate yourself, and then magnify any and all of the perceived flaws. Once you identify what the inner saboteurs are, then you have the ability to catch and stop these harmful thought patterns and then correct them to be more realistic.
• Eliminating The Diet Mentality – For the majority of people, diets aren’t an effective or a healthy way of calorie restriction, or a way of eliminating particular food groups or ingredients.
This because once you’re wanting to omit some of your favorite foods from your life, what that usually means is you can’t eat them ever again. And placing that type of restriction on yourself most likely won’t work, as completely eliminating the foods that you dearly love, will just increase any craving that you have for it.
Once these cravings begin to increase, all of the behavioral urges increase as well. Then not only are you more than likely to eat more of these forbidden foods, but will usually gorge as well.
What then follows that food binge episode which is bound to happen is that it will offset any previous dieting effort you may of done, and then the feelings of shame and guilt set in.
Why Most Diets Don’t Work
Most diets will usually rely on external sources which tells you how and what to eat, which includes calorie or point counting, measuring the amount of food, and obsessive food weighing, etc.
Instead, learning what works for you the best when it comes to better nutrition becomes more important, the fact that some days you may need more food than others, while other days less.
These external sources can’t always tell you or gauge what your body needs nutritionally. So what becomes more important to learn is how to recognize hunger and its satiety cues.
Know that there’s a distinct difference between physical hunger which needs actual body nourishment because your stomach is empty, and emotional hunger, when you overeat out of boredom, guilt, frustration, or habit.
It’s known that problems with one’s Weight Loss usually isn’t caused by hunger issues alone. More often, the problems arises from undisclosed underlying emotional problems which can become tangled with eating behaviors that are unhealthy.