A couple asked me about body-image issues today. They had already communicated with each other about their preferences—which is not always a great idea. She now knows he (thinks that he) prefers a certain waist-to-hip ratio, and he knows she (thinks that she) likes it better when he’s got a bit more muscle than he seems to have these days. Saying that stuff costs more than it’s worth. Why not just assume your partner shares the same general taste as the rest of the culture around you, and live your life? If and when you’re ready to attempt the kinds of changes that suit you, give it a shot. If you have some success, and your main squeeze actually notices it, that’s great. You want to be changing for you, not for them, anyway.
Fussing about how you think you prefer your partner’s body to look, is a fool’s errand. You can advocate for an increase in your shared activity level; get some bicycles; get a dog to have to take constant walks with, etc. There’s plenty of stuff you can do that may help get you both into shape. But there’s usually no good reason to say you’re disappointed with the other person’s body—unless things are really out of control, and the physical issues are egregious enough to be part of a larger problem. Which is pretty rare.
Most of the time, our bodies remain more or less the same, and most of us exercise just enough to keep them roughly the way they are, staving off deterioration. Sometimes an exercise program will get sustained, and somebody will win-through to eventually obvious good results. But most of us aren’t chasing that anyway—just exercising to stay healthy. Life is for living, and as a professor of mine once said, “It’s not a damn beauty contest.”
Often patients report feeling icky about the naked body they see in the mirror. That hurts, and there are many good books (not all of them addressed to women, though most are) about how to cope with those painful feelings and neutralize them. I want to offer an analogy that the people I saw this morning found very helpful.
It goes like this:
When we talk about monetary wealth, it seems obvious that the more dollars you have, the less poor you are. What seems to count is simply the number of dollars in the bank. But that’s only part of the truth; it’s just an approximation. The real measure of financial freedom is purchasing power. One dollar in the year 1900 paid for the same goods you can only buy today for $38. So the single bill in that era was worth more than a twenty is worth now. Because of inflation, the absolute number of dollars is relevant but misleading; their actual value is the meaningful thing.
In a similar way, the numerical data you associate with your appearance—your weight, measurements, various muscle sizes, BMI, the dimensions of gendered body parts, all that quantitative stuff—is relevant but misleading. The actual value lies in the quality of your experience as an embodied human being. It’s your body image, not your actual body, that determines whether you’re at home in your own skin or miserable about not looking like someone else, whether that’s a past self or a rival or a movie star.
If you don’t like your belly, or your arms, or whatever, there are two main issues: the physical facts, and your difficult feelings about them. Both can change. But you can start with the feelings. Easing up on the scornful judgments will make you more free, not less free, to govern your own policies about your physical life. Hating the flesh that keeps you alive is not much of a real contributor to your motivated self care (i.e., getting-in plenty of regular physical activity, or refraining from impulsively eating your feelings). People work out or stay active because it makes them feel good, not because they’re at war with themselves. Letting go of the anxious high standards, letting go of the contempt, letting go of the relentless measuring and comparing—it won’t prevent you at all from going on to do the kind of incremental improvement that feels good and gradually makes a sustained positive difference. If loving your body still feels unfeasible just now, start off by being polite to it, and build from there.
If you’re married, or in a committed relationship, the way your partner responds to your physicality is probably part of how you feel about what you see in the mirror. Give each other the working materials to easily generate an erotic home-base that feels hot and sexy sometimes, warm and friendly most of the time, and coldly evaluative never.
Judgements and measurements are for competition, and home is not a place to compete. Make it easy to feel good naked there. Make it easy to delight in your gift of aliveness, as you both already are, right now. And if it feels important, you can also make it easy to reach for small wise lifestyle changes in the name of longevity and embodiment, not shame or guilt. Help each other to move away from the darkness of measurement and evaluation, toward the light of acceptance and exploration. You might as well.