How you feel about your body influences what you feed your body. When a negative body image affects food choices, you're more likely to overeat--thinking that you'll always be fat, so there's no point in trying--or under-eat--believing that regardless of your actual weight, you'll never be thin enough. Conversely, a healthy body image motivates you to make nutritious food choices to provide your body the nourishment it needs to maintain a healthy body weight.
Body Image
A healthy body image involves having an accurate perception of your size and shape and feeling comfortable in your own skin. With an unhealthy body image, you have a distorted perception of your own body, frequently compare yourself to others and feel shame, stress or unhappiness about your body. An unhealthy body image can exacerbate feelings of low self-esteem, create additional psychological stress and contribute to eating disorders.
Unhealthy Eating
Making food choices based on emotional needs rather than biological needs characterizes unhealthy eating, whether you're overeating or under-eating. For example, making food choices to relieve feelings of stress or anxiety, to ease the pain of life or to gain control represents emotionally-driven eating. These unhealthy eating patterns can lead to underweight or overweight, both of which can worsen a negative body image and lead to further unhealthy eating patterns.
Causes
Eating disorder specialist and author Susan Schulherr says a person who habitually overeats may do so to deal with the threat of being overwhelmed with sexual attention, negative feelings or memories or other threatening circumstances. When overeating dulls this pain, the tendency to continue doing so increases. Eating too little may be a reaction to physical or sexual violence, feelings of being out of control or societal promotion of unhealthy physical ideals.
Healthy Eating
Eating when you're hungry to nourish and sustain your body represents healthy eating. Being flexible is more psychologically healthy than controlling food choices by adhering to a pre-determined nutrition plan, according to Schulherr. However, general principles of nutrition--such as those contained in the USDA's food pyramid--can help you make healthy food choices.
Developing a Positive Body Image
To develop a healthy body image, Schulherr recommends making a list of things you like about your body--not only physical characteristics, but also what your body allows you to do. She discourages reading fashion magazines or clipping photos of models or actors as motivation. Instead, she says, search for role models among people who appear at ease with their bodies, particularly when those bodies don't match the cultural ideal. According to the National Women's Health Information Center, regular exercise can improve body image. Exercise also contributes to overall health and helps maintain a healthy body weight.
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