Why body image issues are more pervasive than ever

Over the last few years, I’ve allowed myself to shamelessly indulge in watching trashy reality TV (like an intellectual). I’m a connoisseur at this point. I see reality TV as a cultural thermostat, a lesson in sociology if you will.

In a conversation with a friend, as I was explaining the premise of one of these human-lab-rat situations, my friend responded by talking about one of his guilty pleasure TV shows - Naked Attraction.

In Naked Attraction, contestants pick a person to date based on viewing sections of other contestants’ body parts that are gradually revealed from behind a screen, starting with the feet and working their way up until the entire (yes, entire) body is revealed. 

Of course, my guy friend would enjoy watching this.

However, what he liked about the show wasn’t what I expected him to say. 

He said the show was less surface-level than you’d think, and the contestants were people with… normal looking bodies. Flabby, pasty, wrinkly, blotchy, untoned, wobbly, hairy bodies. 

The types of bodies you never see on television, representing a more realistic sample of society. Seeing people who don’t have ‘perfect bodies’ get picked on a dating show was, he said, quite a refreshing contrast to watching impossibly good-looking folk lust over each other under the guise of ‘deep connection’. In a way, it can make you feel less shame about your own body when you realise that your insecurities are quite normal, and not necessarily something that others would be put off by.

It’s a great point. Unless you’ve had the privilege of seeing hundreds of people of varying genders, ages, shapes, colours and sizes without clothes on (hopefully consentually), most of us don’t really have a good idea of what other people’s bodies actually look like. 

It’s bad manners to stare at people on the beach, so I think we try and avoid doing it (I do know of one man who frequents Mission Bay in the summer who’s an exception), and unless you’ve ever joined in on a nudist festival or taken a live painting class, we don’t get the chance to observe minimally-clad bodies out in the wild very often.

What we see instead are airbrushed, posed, and edited depictions of very specific body types morphed into cartoonish versions of how we think bodies are supposed to look. Thus, we have allowed these images to tell us what’s ‘normal’ and ‘attractive’, resulting in a widespread pandemic of poor body image.

I did a podcast episode where I explained how your dream body isn’t real. I talk about what I learnt from my experience with bodybuilding, that even if you do manage to reach peak leanness, without losing muscle tone, so that when you pose - you can look similar to people you’ve been following on social media - your mind will play tricks on you and tell you that you’ve still got work to do. You’re never satisfied with how you look, and that’s what the whole sport of bodybuilding is basically about.

It’s similar to how people joke about how they wish they were as fat as the first time they ever thought they were fat - a sentiment that many, if not most, people can relate to. 

If you struggle to think of a point in your lifetime where you ever genuinely felt happy with how your body looked and had zero insecurities about it (apart from when you were below the age of about 8), let me assure you now that no amount of weight loss, plastic surgery or working out will get you to a place where you actually are.

Unedited paparazzi pictures of celebs in bikinis still go viral because people love to point out cellulite and saggy bottoms if and when they present. If that’s the kind of backlash that abnormally gorgeous people who uphold the beauty standard get for existing in their bodies, we normies don’t stand a chance against the harsh scrutiny of our perceptions of what’s attractive or not.

We don’t have a point of comparison most of the time, because the images we’re being fed are of a very specific type of body that doesn’t even look like that in reality.

The only way to truly be happy in our bodies is to accept that our bodies will probably never look exactly the way we’d like them to.

And it’s only once we get to this place of ‘what-the-heckery’, that our focus around health and fitness can shift more to ‘well, in that case - how is it that I want to feel?’ instead of solely being concerned about how we look.

Most of the time, we want to feel confident, feel healthy, feel empowered, feel energetic, feel stronger, feel more positive… Following a route that allows you to discover these feelings may or may not result in also changing how your body looks, but by taking that sole focus away, the pressure of chasing something that you may never achieve (a body that you like the look of) goes away. That’s the kind of body image freedom that I hope that all of my clients (and everyone who reads my newsletters) get to achieve someday.

Enjoy your weekend, hopefully you can take time to relax, and maybe watch some trashy television. Let me know your recs. 

And try not to be so hard on your body this week,

He/she/they are doing their best to support you. <3

Take care,

Lx