Many women are always feeling like they are not thin enough or beautiful enough. But really it’s just your own mind playing tricks on you. To be happy with yourself, you first have to accept yourself as such.
The world is showing us how to be beautiful with shapely bodies, and the general opinion is that the thinner you are, the better. So you’re not the only one who wants to have a slimmer body, women everywhere do. Because of this dream, we often feel a depression. But ever wonder what would happen if you let go of your obsession?
We’re all so focused on the “ideal body” that we lose sight of whether we really need it. According to psychotherapist Elisabeth Martin, “When people accept themselves, it’s easy for the body to change. The limbs become softer, and the gait is more relaxed. Miraculously, all that flab we’ve been racking our brains to lose starts to disappear, and diets that were previously ineffective start to take effect.”
Learn to accept yourself
We’re not all born equal when it comes to weight. Xiao Yang, a member of the “Thousand Gold” group, weighs 175 kg. She started gaining weight 100 days after she was born at 3.4 kg, while her siblings are said to be slim. Genetics and human figure are closely related, so in the matter of “slim”, not everyone enjoys the same treatment. In addition, personal eating habits, including childhood feelings about food, as well as the degree of maintenance of their respective eating habits, also affect our body shape. A person who grew up eating rice would see it as a natural part of life, while someone who grew up eating cheese would see the same importance of cheese – and these two different dietary habits would make a difference in their body size.
If we always aim for the “ideal body,” we may feel obese even though we have a slim, beautiful body. “The idea that thin people feel overweight is hard to correct,” Elizabeth explains, “because it’s the crux of other difficulties – to prevent the ego from being subversively questioned, she’d rather blame love frustration by blaming it on body image. This would cause her to unconsciously reject her femininity.”
Our image is there, the “her” in the mirror is so clear, but it’s hard to see ourselves as real and objective, because our minds control our perceptions of our bodies. A person who thinks he or she is “too much” will feel that he or she is taking up too much space, and with it, that he or she is overweight, and that the impression of awkwardness makes us see ourselves in the mirror as fat and ugly.
Elizabeth argues, “What we see is never who we are, because our vision is determined by two basic factors: on the one hand, the way our parents evaluate our appearance and gender identity, and on the other hand, our own internal self-image, which we have been shaping since early development. Psychologically, our real body shape is far less significant than our ideal body shape, which is shaped over a long period of time by our family and love history. So, in order to feel good about ourselves and avoid being hard on ourselves, we need to see ourselves a little better.”
This kind of good self-esteem is exactly what Mo Hui, 28, lacks. Her parents lacked warmth and were very disappointed to have a girl that year. The lack of emotion makes it hard for Mo Hui to look at her body objectively. When everyone told her she was fine, she still felt fat. She wanted to compensate for her dissatisfaction with her size by increasing her intelligence, so she concentrated on her studies early on. But that didn’t change Mo Hui’s physical and mental conflicts: “I wanted to be at peace with myself, but my body always made me uneasy. I feel like I’m so fat that I can’t wear gym shorts or tights.”
Psychological influences on fatness
If a person believes psychologically that life is impossible, her body will respond accordingly. Someone who dreams of being a big person but can’t achieve it may unconsciously conform herself physically to that type of person, such as needing to gain weight in order to become majestically important.
Also, the body is a unified whole that is the result of psychological effects. If a person is mentally separated into chunks, then the body she perceives will not be a complete and unified form, but an amalgam of parts. For example, the child sees her body as parts that can be disassembled and assembled, and the mother’s touch and words create a sense of bodily unity in her psyche.
“Psychological gaps make us perceive our bodies separately as well,” Elizabeth elaborates, “and we meet people who perceive just parts of their bodies, some parts they like and some they don’t. ‘The hips, they’re okay, but my belly is too big.’ They will always be aware of themselves and ask people around them without fail, ‘Don’t you think I’m still fat?’ For them, their bodies have been ‘compartmentalized’ and the gap between their real bodies and their ideal bodies is extreme.”