Your Body, Self-Image & Self-Criticism

I’m not an expert here. I have no traditional education background here. I am simply living through healing myself with the practices that I am learning through various books and research studies.

My purpose here… just to share my own side, what I have learned, and my opinion on it all as well as my resources that have helped a great deal. And let’s start there, the books ♥️

Book Recommendations

If you need help in this area, I highly recommend finding a mental health professional. I have had a few throughout my healing journey that have added so much to my growth and ability to cope.

Developing Body Trust

As I was searching for an answer to how to heal a horrible self-image perception that I had of myself, I found Reclaiming Body Trust: A Path to Healing & Liberation. In this book, Hilary Kinavey and Dana Sturtevant created a concept for developing a healthy relationship with your body called the Body Trust.

They start out with an explanation of the three different levels that you may feel regarding your body to reach Body Trust.

Body Disconnect: Feeling disconnected from your body, ignoring cues like hunger, and relying on external rules.
Body Control: Striving to control your body to meet societal or personal ideals through strict dieting and exercise. Often leads to frustration and dissatisfaction.
Body Chaos: Rebelling against control, engaging in impulsive eating or unhealthy habits as a response to perceived failure.
Body Trust: Developing a deep trust in your body’s wisdom, listening to internal cues, and making choices based on overall well-being rather than external standards.

And their breakdown is the one that has made the most sense to me as an abuse survivor. I dissociated often to protect myself. And this was a coping mechanism that helped. But at the same time, this also left a bit of a disconnect.

In my own journey, I have had to learn to sit still with myself. Start to understand what I am feeling and what is real and not real, especially regarding hunger. I had developed some coping and soothing mechanisms. I had developed habits. These were things that I had to untangle from what my body was, trying to tell me. I did a lot of this at first with my therapist and continued the practices at home as I went through other books to try to understand which words would best resonate with me and help me make my way through. Sometimes, we do need something said 10 different ways because the 10th time is when it makes sense.

Once I was able to reconnect at the very beginning of my weight loss, journey of 135 pounds, I did find myself in a place of overly trying to control everything now that I understood it better. This was good until it wasn’t. I had a tendency to react to things like pendulum swings. I would go from complete control to complete chaos.

Check this out: All-Or-Nothing Mentality with Eating

But over the last 3 to 4 years, I have been really trying to understand how to better trust myself. This has not been easy and it is nowhere near done. But each and every day, I am getting one step closer. This site was created as part of that too. This was to share some of the journey along the way. This last year was a furthering into mindfulness and breaking out of a diet mentality. I have also openly been sharing My Mirror Talk Work on Instagram.

BACK TO BODY TRUST!

The authors also spend a good amount of time focusing on developing body respect, acceptance, trust, and love. If you are looking for a resource to just expand your thought process on what might be possible when it comes to healing your relationship with your own body image, I highly recommend this book.

Body Respect: Valuing your body’s worth and treating it with kindness and care.
Body Acceptance: Embracing your body as it is, letting go of perfection and recognizing all bodies are worthy.
Body Trust: Developing intuitive trust in your body’s signals and needs.
Body Love: Cultivating a positive and loving relationship with your body, appreciating its strengths and uniqueness.

I cannot recommend this book or the other books listed within this article enough. They have helped broaden my perspective and aid my growth in my self-love & self-worth journey.

What Seems To Start The Self-Criticism?

After learning to be more still, I needed to start looking at the inner critic more.

What was it saying? Why? Where is it coming from?
Does it come from other people? Honestly, are these people leaving you feeling like your best or your worst?
Is it coming from my surroundings?
Did it start with scrolling social media?
Is it from a piece of clothing? A clothing size?
Did it get triggered by seeing a number on the scale?
Was it from you looking in the mirror?

Get really, really curious! It matters. It matters a ton. The way that we speak to ourselves… That’s what we believe about ourselves. This is worth spending the time on. Your body is your true one and only home. How you treat it and what you say about it matters.

Want proof? Check out Chatter: The Voice in Our Head, Why It Matters, and How to Harness It

Ok, But Now What Do I Do?

Ok, so you got still. You heard the critic. It was mean!

What do you do?

What else?

Take note of the people that you feel good around. Take note of those that you do not feel good around either in the moment or later on.
Fill your spaces with images that inspire you or lift you up.⁠ How do you feel in your room? How do you feel in your home? Does it make you feel happy and cheerful? Does it make you feel sad?
Unfollow accounts that make you feel bad about your body or the choices you’re making. This is something that you are consuming. This is something that is becoming a part of you. Take your time to really pay attention to what you’re consuming in all areas of life and how it makes you feel.
Do you have a pair of jeans that no longer fit you? Get rid of them! Buy things that fit your body. NO ONE KNOWS THE NUMBER ON THE SIZE TAG!
Try seeking different progress measurements. Do you have more energy to play with your kids? Are you sleeping better?⁠ Check out for other progress measurements & non-scale victories: Non-Scale Victories (NSVs) and The Scale, Fluctuations & A Goal Weight
Practice body gratitude. What do you like about your body or what it allows you to do? I started with “I like my eyes” and moved to “I like my collarbone”. Here’s the thing… this is your practice. It only has to be okay by your standards and when I started, those were the real statements that I had. I refused to lie to myself or force out some toxic positivity.

Self-Compassion Is A Practice

So there’s a whole other side of this when it comes to body image and wanting to improve your body composition. We need to have a level of acceptance of where we are. And we can do that while still wanting to change.

But trust me…

With a practice of self-compassion, we want to learn how to be in this present moment as we also set our sights on what we want to become. It’s about acceptance in both of those things. Those two things can be true.

I can enjoy the way that a dress fits me before heading out on a date with my husband and also want it to fit me in a different way later on. I know what I’m saying here. This is a really difficult one but over time…. The practice will grow and will make more sense. We can accept where we are and still want to change.

Challenge it

Another way to practice self-compassion is to look at the thoughts that you have and challenge them.

Dig a little bit deeper.

Are these your thoughts? Did they come from somewhere else? Do you think that maybe there might be other things going on right now in your life that are causing the discomfort that is surfacing in how you feel about yourself?

If you’re looking to grow your self-compassion practice, seek out mindfulness books. That is where I began to deepen my own practice.

Check out:

Body Composition Work (Dieting, Recomposition & Building Muscle)

We just talked about accepting where you are, and also accepting that you may want to change. So what’s next?

Paint a picture ♥️ This is when I, as a coach, would talk to somebody about what they want. How do you want to look? How do you want to feel? What do you want your life to look 5 years from now?

Do you want to look “more tone”?

It might be time to look at consuming more in order to let your muscles grow and build the shape that you want.

Do you want to “slim down”?

It might be time to enter into a calorie deficit and movement practice to help see your body get smaller.

Do you want both?

Wellllllll that is going to need a more definitive FIRST path. And here’s the best way that I can help you figure that without knowing a lot more about your life to help guide you through it better.

Will you feel comfortable, possibly putting on more weight in the moment, knowing that it will get you to where you want to be down the road and possibly faster?

If you want to look “tone”, you’re going to need the muscle to be built. And that’s most efficiently done when you’re eating enough calories and macronutrients. When you put the work in this area first, you build your body up to be able to then move into a deficit later and be able to reveal all of the hard work you put in a lot faster.

If you do not feel comfortable, putting on more weight right now, because that is a real thing. There is a very big mental side of this as we have read above. You are only ready for what you are ready for. You have to live in your body. If losing some weight first will make you feel better, then that is the route that you need to take.

Change of heart?

If you begin to go into the process of losing weight or gaining muscle and realize that there are things that right now you are unable to commit to, or unwanting to let go of, allow yourself to change your mind and choose the other direction.

The point here is that…

You get to choose.

Composition Work Mindset: Body Image Flexibility

But about that change of heart… Take the time to challenge that as well. From time to time, we switch in and out of processes too quickly, and things were just about to happen.

Body composition work like a calorie deficit to lose weight, a recomposition to change your body’s current composition, or a calorie surplus to build muscle takes TIME.

And your body is going to change. That is the entire goal.

You are working to change your body and how it changes by month three of a one-year process is not necessarily indicative of what it will look like at the end.

There are going to be times when maybe you don’t feel comfortable. There are going to be times when you don’t feel certain. And that’s OK.

I challenge you to practice flexibility with your thoughts and with your body image.

Flexibility with your body image is about loving your body in the moment that it’s in and knowing that it is changing and all of those things are okay. You are intentionally doing this. This is not something happening to you. This is something happening because of you. This is your choice.

Body image flexibility refers to the ability to openly experience thoughts or feelings about the body without acting on them or trying to change them. Accumulating evidence has demonstrated that body image flexibility is connected to numerous adaptive processes…
https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/33684721/

Own it

Try to be proud of your body and how it is changing. If somebody makes a comment on your body, it is most likely coming from a place of admiration, and not meant to have malicious intent. Also, your body may hold weight in certain areas or put muscle on faster in other areas. There’s nothing wrong with this. This is the beauty of your body and what makes you an individual.

Keep your favorites

Try to hold onto some of your favorite pieces of clothing from one size to the next if you intend to do body composition work. Then, at least you have some things that you love to wear already when your body is in different shapes and sizes. No one is ever going to know what the size tags say unless you let them know.

clothes & confidence

But there’s also a different side to this as your body changes, you may have to figure out how to dress for your body type. This is going to take time, but it is well worth it because you are now dressing specifically for your body and what flatters it. There are tons of different styles and there are tons of different guides. Spend the time here. It matters. The more confident you feel because you like the way that you look in certain clothing, the more you will project that confidence in other aspects of life.

Your Body, Self-Image & Self-Criticism

Book Recommendations