Book Review: More than a Body

Posted on September 21, 2022August 5, 2022 by Alison Pelz, LD, RD, CDE, LCSW

Book Review: More than a Body: Your Body is an Instrument, not an Ornament

More than a Body is an important read for those suffering from a negative body image.

Authors Dr. Lexie Kite and Dr. Lindsay Kite (not only sisters, but also identical twins!) are well versed in body image research. Not only do the authors provide a great discussion of what body image is, and how it developed, they deliver an extensive discussion on the influence of society on our body image.

What is this book about?

Lexie and Lindsay provide a framework of body image disturbance and postulate that objectification, both historically and current, of women (and with increasing frequency, boys’ and men’s bodies) is one of the main causes of body image disturbance.

That is, we are trained to focus on how our bodies are seen by others versus what our bodies can do.

In turn, we internalize this message and begin to self-objectify our own bodies. This self-objectification shifts our attention to how our bodies look instead of how we feel in our bodies.

As you can imagine, self-objectification can lead to being preoccupied with the way our bodies look, including increased body comparison and body checking in mirrors.

This shift of our energy and awareness from how our bodies feel to how our bodies look takes up a lot of time and energy, and just leads to feeling badly about yourself and your body.

It often starts from a young age, because a lot of media promotes cultural standards of beauty, even still in 2022. The message has always been that it doesn’t matter how you feel in your body, it matters how the world around you sees your body.

The authors of More Than a Body put forth that women are conditioned to first define themselves by how their body looks and second that they are people with inherent worth.

In a way, the messaging is getting more troubling. Slowly but surely, companies are starting to get the message that appealing to old-school body insecurities doesn’t create as much of a profit as it used to. Instead of being loud about weight loss or fat shaming, companies now try to appeal to people by using language taken from the body positivity movement.

We’ve seen brands like Weight Watchers change their name to WW in an attempt to move their image away from weight loss to “lifestyle change”, while still promoting intentional weight loss and a disordered approach to eating. Everything is still reduced down to the way people look, and not their inherent value as humans.

In order to heal from negative body image, the authors urge us to internalize that we are people first. And our bodies know that we are inherently good.

What did I like about this book?

Importantly, the authors do acknowledge that most body image research is done on cis, white, and often straight-sized bodies. They also discuss weight bias and its harmful effects in addition to discussion on historically marginalized bodies.

The authors’ discussion of the body positivity movement is especially insightful.

They acknowledge that the body positivity movement has expanded the types of bodies (read: size) that are deemed socially acceptable. However, the body positivity movement is flawed because it still focuses on the objectification of women’s bodies.

The idea itself that bodies are to be looked at and objectified is problematic, because who we are as people goes so far beyond what our bodies look like. Having more bodies that we decide as a society are acceptable to look at does nothing to solve the problem of objectifying bodies in the first place, it just adds to the objectification taking place.

The Drs. Kite propose that the only way to improve body image is to eliminate self-objectification and connect with our bodies for what they do for us over how they look. This can be pretty tough to do in the age of social media advertising and diet culture.

The tagline of this book, “Your body is an instrument, not an ornament,” resonates with me as a woman, and in my work with clients.

It is a great mantra to keep at the top of your mind to shift your focus from how your body looks to what your body does for you.

The book is lengthy and provides more of a framework of why we are fraught with negative body image rather than provide solutions for body image problems. I appreciated that the authors used vignettes to explain their work, and they often cite research to back up what they’re saying.

If you’re looking into the background of where negative body image comes from and want to learn more, this book will be an interesting read for you. If you’re looking for actionable solutions for body-image problems, this book might not be what you’re looking for.

Who should read this book?

I would recommend this book to:

clinicians who treat people with body image disturbance
parents & caregivers who want to learn more about how to raise children with healthy body image
those who suffer from body image disturbance
folks who are in the later stages of eating disorder treatment

Although this book is better than some at expanding the body image discussion past cis, white, straight size, abled bodies, the fact that it is more than likely aimed at this audience (rather than the marginalized bodies it briefly focuses on) it is one of the limitations of the book.

The authors have developed an online course (which I have not taken) as another body image resource. But, I also hope that they consider developing a workbook to accompany this book to help guide folks through the difficult process of connecting with our bodies for what they do over how they look.

Are you curious to learn more about the authors of this book and their perspective on body image?

Here is a link where you can hear Dr. Linsday Kite speak on body image – this video also gives a solid introduction to the book.

Understanding your body image and where it comes from is key in eating disorder recovery. If you’re looking for more support in changing your body image, please click here to schedule a free 15-minute phone consultation with me.

2021: A Year In Review

Posted on December 15, 2021December 14, 2021 by Crowncreatives

What a year! 2021 was our second year in a pandemic, and seemed just as chaotic and challenging as 2020 was. Take a moment to pat yourself on the back for making it to the end of this year, it certainly hasn’t been easy, but I’m so glad you’re here. This too shall pass, and until it does, I’ll be here to support you virtually to stop feeling out of control and gain a sense of calm in relationship with food and your body

This year, more than ever, people experienced anxiety and burnout. If you’re feeling like you’re running on empty, you’re not alone. I hope you get some quality time to rest and recuperate this season. It’s always important to rest, but with the constant chaos of existence right now you might be feeling the need to slow down more than ever. I encourage you to lean into it!

You’re allowed to have periods of rest, and it’s important to listen to your body when it’s trying to tell you something. Consider this your permission slip to do nothing but self-care for the rest of the year!

Every year, I like to round up all of my blog posts from the year in one place. It’s fun to look back on the year through these posts, and I hope you find them useful as you work toward peace with food.

Here’s what I wrote about this year:

5 Reasons not to Diet in 2021 (or Ever)

“Unless you are taking a break from social media and the news, you most likely have been bombarded with messages about dieting and weight related New Year’s resolutions. Diet programs are promising the magic bullet for good health and weight loss in the New Year.

Maybe this year you are re-thinking your New Year’s resolutions. Perhaps you are beginning to notice that dieting is taking up too much space in your life or you are tired of worrying about what you eat or what you look like. It could be you are looking to “get off the diet roller coaster” permanently and heal your relationship with food and your body.

If you are ready to give up dieting, you’re not alone. Consider these five reasons to quit dieting for good.”

Anorexia Nervosa: One Size Does NOT Fit All

“Unfortunately, there are many incorrect assumptions associated with eating disorders. One I see a lot is the assumption that in order to have an eating disorder, particularly anorexia nervosa, one has to have very low body weight. This is simply not true.

Sadly these assumptions block those suffering from eating disorders from getting the life-saving treatment they need. In fact, most people with eating disorders don’t necessarily fit neatly into an eating disorder category.

Eating disorders are more about how the person relates to food, exercise, and body than what a person looks like.”

The Body Image-Eating Disorder Connection

“How we perceive our bodies is influenced by many factors, including family, friends, media, gender identity, culture, and the health-care system, to name a few. Body image is not static. It may change depending on our mood, situation, stage of life, or the season.

The majority of those who suffer with eating disorders have a negative body image. One of the key features of eating disorders is the overvaluation of weight, shape, and eating habits on self-worth.

Self-worth is how and what we think about ourselves. In other words, those who struggle with eating disorders equate much of their self-worth with their ability to control their weight, shape, and eating habits. Having a negative body image often keeps the eating disorder going.”

Maintaining Eating Disorder Recovery as a College Freshman

“College can be a difficult transition for anyone, but if you’re in recovery for an eating disorder, it can be a particularly stressful transition!

Some of the challenges of maintaining your recovery while returning to school include change in routine, increased demands and independence, and exercise/diet culture.

Remember: it’s normal for eating disorder symptoms to recur in times of high stress and periods of transition. But by taking time to consider how your recovery will be impacted in this period of transition, you can create a plan to cope with stress and continue with your recovery.”

Why You Should Try Body Acceptance Over Body Positivity

“The idea of body positivity has its roots in fighting diet culture, but the term doesn’t resonate with everyone. After all, feeling positive about your body is a tall order for a lot of people.

First of all, there is a multi-billion dollar diet industry that uses its considerable resources and influence to convince us all that there is something wrong with our bodies. Feeling insecure about how our bodies look is a surefire way to get us to buy products that will “fix” us. However, consider the idea that there was nothing wrong with your body in the first place.

People who are chronically ill or disabled might not feel like they can be positive about a body that is constantly in pain or not able to move through the world easily. People who are recovering from eating disorders might not trust their body’s cues or might feel distress when thinking about their bodies.

Body acceptance might feel like a more attainable goal than body positivity.”

4 Tips for Anyone Who Loves an Adult in Eating Disorder Recovery

“It’s possible for eating disorders to initially develop later in life, not just during adolescence. It’s also possible that adults suffering from an eating disorder developed it during adolescence and never fully recovered. Life stressors (like a pandemic, for example!) later in life can also cause a relapse of eating disorders.

Eating disorders develop for a variety of reasons including genetics, temperament, gender, and dieting history to name a few.

It is less important why and how the eating disorder developed, and more important to focus on supporting your loved one in their eating disorder recovery.”

I’ll be back in 2022, writing more about ED recovery, food peace, and weight bias. If there are any topics you want me to cover next year, let me know. You can send me a message here, and you can also follow me on Facebook. Every week, I share resources from myself + other eating disorder experts, so follow if you’re looking for more information.

Consider Body Acceptance Over Body Positivity

Posted on October 20, 2021September 16, 2024 by Alison Pelz, LD, RD, CDE, LCSW

There’s a lot of buzz in the wellness and mental health worlds about body positivity and body acceptance, but what do those terms even mean?

Body acceptance is the idea that it’s not always possible to feel positively about your body, but it is always possible to accept it and treat it with kindness. The end goal of both of these is to increase the acceptance of all body sizes and to help people feel more comfortable in their own bodies.

In contrast, body positivity is the idea that everyone deserves to feel positively about their body image. If you’ve ever seen a post on social media telling you to “love your body”, then you’ve probably experienced body positivity.

At first glance, body positivity sounds great. After all, things would be so much simpler if we could all just love our bodies! However, that’s often easier said than done for a number of people.

The idea of body positivity has its roots in fighting diet culture, but the term doesn’t resonate with everyone. After all, feeling positive about your body is a tall order for a lot of people.

People who are chronically ill or have varying abilities might not feel like they can be positive about a body that is constantly in pain or not able to move through the world easily. People who are recovering from eating disorders might not trust their body’s cues or might feel distress when thinking about their bodies.

Body acceptance might feel like a more attainable goal than body positivity.

You might also go back and forth between positivity and acceptance for your body depending on the day. Nothing lasts forever, and the feelings you currently have about your body probably won’t last. What will last are the consequences of the way you treat yourself, so do what you can to show yourself compassion.

It’s important to remember that one isn’t better than the other. Body positivity and body acceptance are options, and if one feels more attainable than the other, don’t push yourself to feel things about your body that you’re not ready for.

Here are some questions that I get asked frequently about body positivity and acceptance:

Question: I hear all of this stuff about body positivity and feel hopeless. I feel like I am nowhere near loving my body. Is it necessary for me to feel body positivity to recover from my eating disorder?

Answer: While body image, or what we feel and think about our body, is closely tied to eating disorders, body positivity is not necessary for recovery. Body positivity is an ideal outcome of recovery, but it’s not the only outcome available.

In a nutshell, body dissatisfaction or a negative body image often contributes to the extreme eating and exercise behaviors we see in folks with eating disorders. In fact, if negative body image is not in check, the eating disorder will keep going. However, feeling positive about your body is not required to start recovery.

Body acceptance is often a more accessible place to start. As mentioned above, body acceptance is the practice of acceptance, even if you aren’t completely satisfied with it. Body positivity is the practice of feeling positively about your body, which can be a lot harder to do.

It is okay to like some parts of ourselves, but not all. Like so much in life (jobs, school), we may like some parts but not all. Either way, we accept that the parts we don’t like are there.

Question: I really don’t like my body. How can I at least work on increasing body acceptance?

Answer: The knee jerk reaction in our culture is if we don’t like something we need to “fix it”. Certainly, diet culture gives a false notion that if we “work hard enough” then we can have the body we want.

I am here to say I have never met a person with an eating disorder that is NOT a hard worker.

Body acceptance is about changing our thoughts about our body, not about changing our body to match our thoughts.

A typical thought someone may have with body dissatisfaction is “If I get my body to look a certain way I will be more confident.”

While there may be some truth to that, changing your looks is not the only way to feel confident. Confidence can come from so many places, but unless you address the root of that insecurity, a new one will pop up in its place.

If you broaden your thoughts, you will see that there are lots of other ways to build or have confidence without staying in your eating disorder.

Another typical thought someone may have about body dissatisfaction is “I am afraid of what people are thinking of me.”

That is to say you fear people will react negatively to you. Lots of times, you don’t even have proof of this happening, but the fear is there all the same.

Unfortunately, many folks who struggle with eating disorders have been teased, ridiculed, or bullied about their body. Many people who struggle with eating disorders come from families that place high value on looks. (If that’s the case for you, this is something to address and unpack with a therapist.)

More often than not, when we assume people are thinking something bad about our bodies, we don’t have any evidence to back this up.

These thoughts and worries are the real distress, not our bodies. Freeing yourself from the worry that other people are judging your body can give you more time to think about what it would feel like to accept your body as it is.

If accepting your body still sounds scary, there are things you can do to help. One way to increase body acceptance is to identify parts of your body that you do like. It is OK to like some parts of your body but not all parts. You can keep a journal where you write down what you like about your body. You can write down something that you’re grateful for that your body does – like how your stomach holds in all your organs and protects them, or how your thighs help you get from place to place. You don’t have to love each little bit of your body to want to take care of it and keep it safe. Acceptance is enough.

Increasing body acceptance is key in eating disorder recovery. If you’re looking for more support in developing body acceptance, please click here to schedule a free 15-minute phone consultation with me.

The Body Image-Eating Disorder Connection

Posted on April 13, 2021April 13, 2021 by Alison Pelz, LD, RD, CDE, LCSW

What is body image?

Body image is how we perceive our bodies and looks. In other words, it is what we say to ourselves or our thoughts about our body. Having body dissatisfaction or a negative body image means that the majority of thoughts about one’s body are negative.

For example, while looking in the mirror, Sarah says to herself, “I am so ugly.” which then produces possible feelings of shame and sadness. However, Sarah doesn’t, get feedback from others that she is “ugly.”. In fact, she often gets comments from friends and co-workers that she looks nice.

When Anna looks in the mirror, she often says to herself, “My thighs are gross,” again leading to feelings of sadness and shame. In contrast, Alicia looks in the mirror and thinks “I am looking good today,” which may lead to feelings of happiness.

How we perceive our bodies is influenced by many factors, including family, friends, media, gender identity, culture, and the health-care system, to name a few. Body image is not static. It may change depending on our mood, situation, stage of life, or the season.

The body image-eating disorder connection

The majority of those who suffer with eating disorders have a negative body image. One of the key features of eating disorders is the overvaluation of weight, shape, and eating habits on self-worth.

Sarah from the example above, is able to identify that she has lots of good things going on in her life, including a strong friend group, a new job that allows her to be financially independent, her volunteer work, and close ties to her family. However, she places much of her self-worth on how she looks. She insists that her other qualities “don’t count”.

Think of self-worth in terms of a pie chart made up of several different categories. Sarah’s self-worth pie chart looks like this:

As you can see, Sarah places a lot of her self-worth on her ability to control her body and eating. When the majority of self-worth is tied to the pursuit of eating “correctly” and maintaining a certain weight and shape, other things that make us feel worthy are ignored. Furthermore, when we can’t control our looks or food in the way that we think we “ought” to, feelings of failure sink self-worth even lower.

Often in the pursuit of improving body satisfaction, we try to change the way our body looks with diet, exercise, and surgery. However, this often comes with lots of distress. One of the most impactful ways to improve your body image is to not actually change your body, but to reduce the emphasis placed on looks as related to self-worth.

After Sarah recovered from her eating disorder, including improving her body image, her self-worth pie chart looked more like this:

You can see that body shape/weight decreased in influence on self-worth. Other categories increased as Sarah was able to experience more joy in those areas and even learned that creativity and spirituality were additional sources of joy for her.

Body dissatisfaction is a key component of eating disorders. Healing your body image is needed in the recovery from an eating disorder.

Body image is often one of the hardest parts of an eating disorder to heal, but it is possible. Remember that to heal your body image, you don’t need to change your body, but rather your thoughts about your body.

If you think you have an eating disorder which often includes a negative body image it is crucial that you get professional help. To learn more about treatment please click here.

Therapy work can help you stop feeling out of control and gain a sense of calm in relationship with food and your body. I would love to help you leave the food worry behind and be free to create the life you want. Schedule your free 15 minute consultation today.