June 6, 2024 • 47 mins
All of us have insecurities when it comes to our appearance, but what happens when these become obsessive and a point of fixation? In today's episode we break down the psychology and pathology of body dysmorphia, including:
- The origins in childhood experiences
- Family history and influence
- The differences in expression between men and women
- The relationship between body dysmorphia and cosmetic surgery
- The influence of toxic gym, diet culture and 'bigorexia'
- How false beliefs influence behaviour
- Dating with body dysmorphia, and more
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Episode Transcript
Available transcripts are automatically generated. Complete accuracy is not guaranteed.
Speaker 1 (00:04):
Hello everybody, and welcome back to the Psychology of Your Twenties,
the podcast where we talk through some of the big
life changes and transitions of our twenties and what they
mean for our psychology.
Speaker 2 (00:23):
Hello everybody, Welcome back to the show. Welcome back to
the podcast. New listeners, old listeners. Wherever you are in
the world, it is so great to have you here,
back for another episode as we, of course break down
the psychology of our twenties. Of your twenties. Before we begin,
a brief trigger warning that this episode does deal with
(00:46):
some fairly in depth discussions around weight loss, weight gain, appearance,
and eating disorders. So please do just take a second
to consider whether you are in a healthy mental space,
a healthy mindset to be listening to this right now.
This episode will still be here in a few days,
in a week, in a few months, so you can
(01:09):
always return to it when the time is right, when
the time is better. Let's get into it today. We
are going to be talking about a pretty vulnerable topic,
one that has I think especially serious implications for our
mental health, both in our twenties and beyond and even before,
and it can also just be such a present and
(01:29):
overwhelming shadow in our lives, our thoughts, our feelings, our
opinions about our body do have this incredible capacity to
really influence every other area of our daily life, of
our existence, of our values, of our relationships, and yet
we really do tend to kind of keep it out
of the light of day. We really avoid discussing this
(01:53):
openly because I think of, you know, well, shame and
how hard it is to come out and say, you know,
at the moment, I really dislike my body, I really
hate some part of me, or I'm fixated on my
appearance and I don't know how to stop it. I
think it's also what it comes down to is embarrassment
as well as shame, the sense that caring this much
(02:14):
about your looks is somehow, you know, vapid or vain,
when actually it goes so much deeper than what other
people might want to label it. It is and can
be very disordered, a very disordered pattern of thinking, and
beyond that, something that is hugely and largely beyond our control.
(02:35):
I've come to realize the more I also choose to
speak more openly about this experience, how many of us
are struggling with some form of negative and harsh thinking
about our bodies, about our weight, about our appearance. But
you wouldn't think that given how much we have trained
ourselves in society has trained us to be silent about it.
(03:00):
Beyond that, it hasn't just trained us to be silent,
it's also trained us to view and treat our body
like it is a constant, working progress rather than something
that we can just be satisfied with as it is.
So consider this your safe space. We're going to discuss
everything to do with this today, specifically the topic of
(03:21):
body dysmorphia and what that actually means. I think we
hear a lot of people talk about how you know
they are dissatisfied with their appearance, with their weight. Is
that always body dysmorphia? Or can we just have symptoms
without a diagnosable condition. The other point that people mention
is how it's really difficult to even be able to
(03:42):
tell what we look like. How a lot of us
are really struggling with just a genuine acknowledgment of our
appearance and how other people see us. Is that body
dysmorphia or is that something else? What is the actual
I would say pathology and criteria behind BDD body dysmorphic disorder.
(04:03):
So we're going to discuss all of that, including the
origins of this condition, what makes us more susceptible, including
the impact of toxic gym and diet culture, how it
manifests the impact, but also some stories from you guys,
the listeners, who were really vulnerable and open about their
personal experiences. And I also just want to talk more
(04:23):
generally about what it means to really dislike your body
without having BDD, and why that is becoming increasingly more common,
and what we can actually do about it. What are
ways of interrupting this really negative belief system that our
appearance is really at the core of our worth all
(04:43):
matters more than it does. So we have so much
to talk about, so much research, so much science, and
of course so much psychology. So without further ado, let
us get into it. Body dysmorphia is one of those
conditions that I think we've all heard about, which is
(05:04):
definitely enlargely misunderstood. So to start off with, I just
want to get our kind of basics downpat what actually
is BDD. So BDD body dysmorphic disorder is a mental
health condition, and it's a lot more than feeling occasionally
negative about your body. It is an entire pattern roundabout
(05:28):
cycle maze, inescapable maze of negative emotions, negative perceptions, and
negative feelings that are all directed towards your appearance. And
what it really involves is an obsessive focus and shame
and anxiety around some perceived flaw in our appearance. This
often very small feature of us. It could be, you know,
(05:52):
some feature of our face, our physique, muscle mass, our skin,
combination of all of those things, our weight, our height,
and this feature becomes a preoccupation, regardless of whether it
is real or imagined, no matter how small it is.
So when I say real or imagined, I mean that
this thing that we really dislike about ourselves. You know,
(06:14):
it could be so tiny and obscure that no one
else would ever notice it. But for us, it feels
like a huge part of who we are. It feels
like we exist in the world, and as we are existing,
this huge spotlight is highlighting to ourselves and everybody around us,
(06:35):
this feature that we really don't like. Even when others
say that we look amazing, they compliment us, they say
we look lovely, They reassure us that no one is
noticing this floor that we are focused on. We can't
believe them. There is a part of us that is
quite honestly delusional and constantly tells us that all these
(06:58):
other people must be lying, just can't see it, they
must be blind in some way. And so we continue
to have this like hyper focus on this floor, and
we normally resort to repetitive behaviors in order to kind
of self soothe or regain some control over this aspect
of our appearance that is causing mental tension. So these
(07:19):
behaviors are things like always checking ourselves in the mirror,
constant mirror checking, constant grooming and touching or skin picking,
only choosing clothes that will hide this feature or a
part of yourself. So these are actually called BDD safety behaviors,
and they're one step above avoidance, whereby they make us
(07:39):
feel like we have control over what part of us
is being made visible to others, and therefore we can
control the judgments that we assume people are making about
us based on this feature. So it's not just that
we have a fixation on this floor. It's not just
that we have this personal spotlight. It's also that in
(08:01):
order to be meeting the criteria of BDD, you have
to become obsessed with how you can fix it. In
our minds, if the floor was to disappear or suddenly
go away, so would all of our mental distress. And
so we are always searching or coming up with a
plan to erase this part of us, whether that is
through excessive exercise, intense skincare routines, or cosmetic surgery. So
(08:29):
cosmetic surgery has a really important kind of place in
this discussion, now that I've kind of brought it up,
what I found was really interesting when I was really
digging into this research is that whilst only about I
would say three to five percent of the general population
has BDD, and that's even quite a generous statistic, it's
(08:51):
probably sitting at around three point five amongst people who
pursue cosmetic interventions, not just surgery but fillers and actions,
non invasive procedures, that prevalence of BDD in that population
rises to almost twenty five percent. So, depending on how
you feel about cosmetic surgery, you may think that this
(09:11):
could provide some relief to people with BDD. It's almost
like a treatment, right, you know, if they're experiencing so
much shame, associated with their appearance. Here is this fix.
But on the other hand, this is a multi billion
dollar industry that makes its money on exacerbating and preying
on these insecurities and the purported ability to kind of
(09:33):
fix them. We have to remember BDD is a mental disorder,
not a physical disorder. The problem is with cosmetic intervention
is that it actually often makes people with body dysmorphic
disorder feel worse or actually just the same. After the procedure.
They may even become more preoccupied with the perceived floor
(09:54):
because it has just changed, it hasn't gone away, and
they can seek further medic procedures, leading to at times
an addiction. So something that really fascinated me about this
kind of interaction between body dysmorphic disorder and cosmetic surgery
is the study that said that, yes, a lot of
people who pursue cosmetic surgery would actually make the criteria
(10:17):
for this mental condition, but more so, they are actually
also the people that are most likely to take legal
action against surgeons because even when the surgeon in their
mind has fixed this flaw, you know, it's it hasn't
gone away, just because it's you know, physical form has
changed this feature of us is once again a preoccupation
(10:39):
that it's coming from something that is kind of mentally
disturbed or mentally I don't like to say broken. Mentally
different is probably a better way mentally disordered, right, It's
just not an accurate reflection of what we actually look like.
It's not an accurate reflection of our physical forms, So
it doesn't actually matter if that feature of us changes.
(10:59):
So obviously not everybody with BDD is going to seek
out cosmetic surgery, but I think it does really reveal
to us how hard it is to control such a
loud and persistent thoughts about our body, and why it
does seem that drastic measures will be the only solution
to silence them. This is often why as well BDD
(11:21):
is compared to parallel disorders like OCD and eating disorders.
I feel like that one might have come to mind
for you almost immediately, And these disorders in particular have
a high chromobility. With BDD, that means that often not often,
but you know, it's not uncommon for people to have
a dual diagnosis. So for these two things to be
(11:44):
occurring at the same time, for somebody to have BDD
and an eating disorder or OCD and BDD. So the
comparison to OCD really emerges because of the excessive sixuation
which results in compulsive behaviors, which really kind of follows
a similar format to how OCD manifests. However, with you know,
(12:04):
body dysmorphia, it's really solely based on an obsession and
a compulsion to do with appearance. So the link to
eating disorders is also quite a common one. If someone
is that disgusted i would say, almost tormented by their appearance.
Sometimes this can really manifest in disordered eating habits, you know,
(12:27):
wanting to control this aspect of yourself through whatever behavior
or means necessary. But it's also important to remember that
a lot of people with BEDD do actually just have
quite normal eating patterns, like you can have BDD without
abnormal eating. It's also interesting because people who are experiencing
(12:48):
anorexia or binge eating disorder or bolimia, yes, they may
find that this has resulted from initial feelings of like
extreme dissatisfaction and fixation with some perceived flaw. But also
another component of this is that sometimes there is you know,
behaviors like restricting food or excessive exercising or purging can
(13:10):
also emerge simply from a place of control, not just
bodily modification, which is why I think BDD is really
deserving of its own separate diagnosis. All right, so let's
talk about risk factors here. There are obviously some people
who are a lot more susceptible to this than others,
like most mental health conditions, And when we talk about
(13:33):
mental health conditions and we talk about who's at risk,
the biggest thing it mostly comes down to, or always
comes back to in some sense, is family history. If
someone in your close or your immediate family has endured BDD,
your chances go up quite a bit. This, You know,
(13:54):
it comes down to genetic predisposition, but also exposure and
life experiences. You know, if that individual with BDD was
a parent, their own experience with this condition is going
to influence how they raise you and how they parent you,
as much as they may try for it not to.
(14:15):
You know, if this kind of condition goes untreated, it
does have the impact of bleeding into all these other
aspects of our lives, including our relationships. So, for example,
I heard from someone who spoke about how their mother
was obsessed with slimness for all her life. She would
endure these like drastic diets. She got multiple surgeries in
(14:38):
the pursuit of this small body, this small physique. She
would always comment on her weight to others. She really
never seemed happy regardless of the results, So definitely meeting
the criteria for BDD here and as a child, this
person spoke about how her mother really implanted a lot
of those beliefs in her through the way that she,
(15:00):
you know, controlled her as a parent. She would, you know,
control her food. For example, she would choose flattering clothes
and colors for her and tell her these are the
colors that you should wear, or you can't wear those things,
they make you look fat. She was constantly commenting on
her skin, especially as she hit puberty and developed acne.
And this person said to me, you know, two years ago,
(15:23):
I got the same diagnosis that my mum had gotten.
And sometimes I think how much of it was genetic
and how much of it was environmental? And was my
you know, the environment of my upbringing. Because in those situations,
how are you meant to develop a healthy sense of
self esteem? How are you meant to detach your appearance
(15:43):
from your self worth? When that kind of preoccupation is
being passed down to you by the person in your
life that matters the most to you as a child,
which is your caregiver. This kind of example, and I
don't like to say example, this person's experienceerience, Yeah, they're
very much personal experience. Really demonstrates to me as well
(16:06):
how negative life experiences also play a really crucial role,
especially experiences like childhood bullying, like neglect, like teasing, like abuse.
So I actually have a story about this that is
from my own life that I've never really shared before
on the show. You know, it never really came up,
(16:27):
but it is one of my earliest and most lucid
memories from childhood. It's also one of those moments that
really goes to show how, you know, passing words can
really leave quite a lifelong mark. So when I was
around seven, six or seven years old, I used to
always go to out of after school hours care Like
(16:47):
I don't know if that's a thing everywhere in the world,
but you know, both my parents were working, and so
I like stayed at the school a little bit longer
with like other kids whose parents were also working or
also had things to do. And we were watching this
movie with a bunch of other kids called the little princess,
and this boy turns to me and he goes, you know,
(17:09):
you would look just like her if you weren't so fat.
I have never been able to shake those words, even
to this day. They have left such an imprint on me.
It was like the first time that I ever felt
shame about my body. And I think when I was
(17:29):
a teenager. Now as an adult, my whole life, my
weight has been a point of fixation for me. There
has never been a period of my life where I've
been satisfied with how I look or how I weigh,
how I feel in my body, and I often wonder
whether that would have been different if that hadn't happened,
(17:50):
because it was almost like this new you know, It
was almost like that was the beginning, Like I became
conscious of everything that I could change that I didn't
like myself, and the fact that people could observe these
things that I didn't like about myself and could make
judgments or mean comments to me about my appearance, and
(18:10):
it mattered. It's also really interesting to me how that
continues to come up as a problem for me in
my life. I posted like this random video on my
Instagram a few weeks ago. If you follow me over there,
I think you'll know which one it is. And it
reached an audience that I basically like didn't intend it
to like. It went semi viral, and the audience was
you know, men in their like thirties and forties who
(18:34):
didn't you didn't agree with what I was saying. And
as always goes with those situations, if like a middle
aged man doesn't agree with what you're saying, the first
thing they're going to resort to doing is making a
comment about your weight or your appearance. And oh my gosh,
did I not get hundreds of them? And they were awful,
And the only thing I could think of was, oh
(18:55):
my god, this is just like this all over again.
It brought me right back to that version of me
who was first really made aware that her body wasn't
just there to climb and to run and to play
and to giggle and to eat yummy foods like it
was there to be judged. Those early life experiences might
seem very far in the past, but they definitely linger,
(19:18):
especially since BDD typically starts, you know, in our early
teen years when everything is so formative, but also when
those childhood experiences and memories are a lot more fresh
and we are a lot more impressionable. So there are
some other risk factors, including personality traits like perfectionism. If
we are, of course preoccupied with being flawless in every
(19:42):
other area of our life, of course our appearance is
going to come into that. You know, the existence of
even a tiny perceived floor, a bad skin day, stretch
marks a facial feature that can really disrupt our whole
identity and be quite distressing. I will say something that
is not a fact to hear is gender. So with
(20:03):
eating disorders, for example, there is you know, typically a
much higher prevalence amongst women. It's normally around three times
the rates that we would see in men for things
like anorexia and bolimia. But for BDD men and women,
people of all genders are influenced the same, It just
(20:23):
expresses itself quite differently. One area that this is really
evident to me is when it comes to weight. Women
typically want to be thinner, whereas men want more muscle.
They're preoccupied with gaining weight. Obviously this isn't always the case,
but I do think that it's a distinction that we
can really see when we just look around ourselves, when
(20:45):
we just compare what our male friends versus our female
friends complain about when it comes to their size. So
in the DSM there is even a specifier around this
particular kind of BDD that results from muscles dysmorphia, whereby
somebody is really engrossed with the idea that their body
(21:05):
build is too small. They are not muscular enough to
be seen as I don't know, manly, or to be
seen as big enough, or worthy enough, or like strong enough,
whatever it is. This, in my mind can also be
really attributed to, I would say, a rise in toxic
gym culture and this idea of big erexia. Now, this
(21:26):
is a term that I learned from a recent article
by the Guardian and they talk about like how you know,
we all know what anorexia is. This is a play
on words, and anorexia is typically associated with the pursuit
of smallness and thinness, whereas big erexia is this pursuit
of being as huge as possible. And in this article
(21:47):
they spoke to some you know, guys and some women
as well, but mainly men about the lengths that they
are willing to go to to achieve this, and how
no matter how many people say, wow, like you are
so huge, huge, You're massive, Like every time they look
in the mirror, they do not see that. They see
themselves as tiny. And this one man in this article
(22:09):
was talking about how he would like eat the only
thing he would eat would be like chicken breasts and
protein sources. And he was like, I looked amazing, Like
in my mind, I looked so huge, but I was
so unhealthy, and like his kidneys started failing and his
livers started failing. And I think that that really comes
(22:31):
down to this crucial point, which is that this obsession
with a muscular body is largely ignored because it's seen
as healthy or a worthwhile bodily pursuit. Because you know,
what's unhealthy about strength, and what's unhealthy about spending time
in the gym, what's unhealthy with fueling your body in
this opt optimal way, what's unhealthy about protein? And I
(22:54):
think a lot of people experiencing this, witnessing this would
be quick to highlight how easy it is for this
to tip into very unhealthy and maladaptive terrain. How this
is just another version of an unrealistic or an extreme
expectation for our body image that is promoted by certain
(23:17):
in groups and certain cultures and certain aspects of society.
So this distinction, this general distinction is I think between
weight loss and weight gain for different genders is essentially
a reflection of what society expects from men and women,
you know, the beauty ideals that each gender is very
much forced to endure. And we can't ignore that component,
(23:38):
the influence of our social conditioning and how we have
been taught to hate our bodies, not instinctially but through
external influence. So BDD, I think, is what I would
call a modern day disorder because it really has arisen
mainly in the last one hundred years, probably even twenty
to fifty years specifically, and it's really emerged, as some
(24:01):
researchers would say, from the fact that we now have
more comparison points than ever to judge ourselves based on,
and we are increasingly being exposed to this messaging around
what we should look like and what is not desirable.
This is because things like TV, advertising, social media, they
have made us more aware of the social norms around
(24:23):
attraction and what society sees as beautiful or not. Secondly,
they've exposed us to what other people look like, meaning,
of course, more opportunities to come up short and compare.
And finally, you know, the media uses looks and appearance
as something through which they can influence and sell us things,
And so let's be honest, they benefit from us not
(24:45):
feeling great. They benefit from us seeing a beautiful person
on TV and wanting whatever skincare product that they're using,
or seeing you know, a huge, huge guy on some
superhero movie and admiring not just this plotline and this
narrative around him being a hero, but the fact that
he looks so great and the fact that we could
(25:07):
copy his work out routine, and the fact that he
is like this really jacked cool guy. And the sociocultural
theory of self esteem would tell you that the messages
given to us by the media about the importance of
appearance and what is hot and what is attractive and
what looks good, they are so easily internalized by us
(25:30):
as individuals, and they also so easily influence how we
treat ourselves, our standards, our habits, and our behaviors. I
think as we feel more pressure to conform with that,
we become more aware once again of the aspects of
ourselves that we feel will be judged based on prevailing
(25:52):
norms of attraction. If I am not thinn does that
mean I will be unhappy? If I I'm not bigger,
If I don't fix my nose, if I don't fix
my skin, does that mean that I will never find love?
Will they consider me for this job? If my hair
is thinning, If I'm too frail, if whatever, my teeth
(26:16):
aren't straight? And all of it comes back to this idea,
this irrational belief that the secret to happiness is our appearance.
I want to share another person's experience here because I
think they articulated it so well, in a much better
way than I ever could. I've struggled with body dysmorphia
(26:37):
and eating disorders since I was twelve. I'm twenty two now.
Last year I started recovery and treatment after being at
my lowest with my symptoms, so I had the urge
of seeking help. It's been a tough journey and very
difficult to accept the diagnosis. The mind blowing thing is
that almost my entire adolescence and early adult years, I
(26:57):
thought life was about my weight, appearance, and body composition,
and I made it till now just like that, fitting
so perfectly into society and no one noticed that something
was going on. What I'd like to emphasize is that
just because weight loss and obsession with appearance is culturally
normalized in our society doesn't mean that it is healthy
(27:20):
or even pleasurable at all. I've been in this mental
prison for years, losing time, missing experiences people that I
will never regain. I really hope that we could move
towards a more inclusive society in terms of body norms,
to not feel like the only way to fit in
is through a stereotype of beauty that is unachievable, unachievable.
(27:43):
I love that this individual. Firstly, thank you so much
for sharing and it's that was like kind of emotional
when I first read that. But secondly, I like that
you finished on that because so many of of the
examples that fuel our body dysmorphia are the one percent
to like crazy amazing genetics, are due to something that
(28:04):
we could never change, and at times or even due
to somebody who themselves has body dysmorphia and who is
you know, undergoing some you know, crazy surgeries and crazy
efforts to fix the part of themselves that we are
sitting back and admiring. So I really think that it
is such a weird mess around where if everybody's experiencing this,
(28:29):
the person that we are probably comparing ourselves too, is
probably looking at us or looking at somebody else and
wanting what they have as well. So, you know, the
norm is constantly evolving, and yet we're constantly chasing the
sense of again that appearance equals happiness. All right, we're
going to take a short break, but when we come back,
I want to discuss whether body dysmorphia is more prevalent
(28:51):
than we think, but also how we can kind of
move through some of the stress, dissatisfaction, worry, anxiety around
our appearance stay with us. There is an important distinction
here between BDD and having the occasional negative perception about
(29:15):
our body, and it is an important one because I
would go so far as to say that nearly every
single one of us has something that they want to
change about how we look, but we aren't really going
to drastic measures to do that. You know, maybe that
doesn't qualify us as having a mental health condition. However,
I think just because it's not as intense as it
(29:36):
is for people with body dysmorphia doesn't make hating your
body easy. It is so difficult to wake up in
a body that you increasingly do not like or find
problem with, because that is your home, you know, as
the incredible Emma Thompson says, that is your vessel. There
is no escaping that you will exist in this body,
(29:59):
and no one else says until the day that you die.
So hating how you look and how you feel quickly
evolves into hating yourself almost instantly, because the two things
you know, yourself or your soul and your appearance your body,
they're very hard to separate. So I wanted to hear
from you guys, the listeners around the world around just
(30:21):
how many of us are experiencing this kind of daily dislike,
how endemic it is, because whilst I think we can
all recognize the universality of warry and dissatisfaction towards our appearance,
I don't think we talk about it enough. But I
think that having a general and a more like kind
of bird's eye view of just how many of us
are going through this is quite comforting. So I kind
(30:44):
of wanted to just siphon it down to the area
of weight loss because I feel like or weight change,
more like weight loss or weight change, because I think
that weight is something that most of us have a
general insecurity about compared to more unique things about ourselves
that are probably different between each of us. You know,
it's kind of hard to talk about, like, oh, would
you want to change that unique scar or would you
(31:05):
want to change that do you want to know his job?
Like when people you know, that's yeah, big insecurity, but
not as prominent as weight is for all of us. So,
you know, it's kind of sad to say it, but
weight dissatisfaction is a bit of a human equalizer. That's
why I chose it. It's out of almost two thousand
of you, seventy percent of you said that in the
(31:26):
past year you had thought about losing weight nearly every month.
And for those of you who said every month, shockingly,
it was like forty seven percent of that faction who
said that you thought about it every day every day,
some nearly fifty percent of you said every day that
weight loss is on your mind, clouding your thoughts and
(31:50):
your judgment. I want you to like genuinely think about
this for a second. Is there any other warrior insecurity
that we all share as much as that one. You know,
as we are all going about our daily lives, we
each have our own unique set of problems. We each
have you know, work deadlines, we each have relationship issues,
we each have small anxieties, small to do lists. And
(32:13):
the one thing that seems to you know, bind us
all together is that in this small reality that is
our own reality, all of us are sharing this collective
thought that we don't like how we look and that
we want to lose weight. Like I was thinking about
this the other day when I was on the train
and I was looking around. It was like a pack train,
and I was like, how many people here right now
(32:34):
have thought about dieting today? How many people on this
train have, you know, put on their Janes in the
morning and been like, oh gosh, I really probably should
lose a few like And that's just crazy to me
because you look at all these people, and you know,
if the statistics that I got from you guys are
saying it, that's like fifty percent of those people on
(32:56):
that train have thought about it that day. Yeah, I
wouldn't have been able to tell you that that's what
they were thinking. And yet I would have thought that
I would be the only one, because our own lives
just feel so unique and so isolated. Beyond that, the
other interesting question I asked you, guys was whether you
think that weight loss or a change in your size
(33:19):
weight game for some people, would make you happier, And
sixty seven percent of you said yes. Is there any
other factor in our life in which two thirds of
us would put our hands up and say, if that changed,
I would be happier. Maybe like winning a million dollars,
maybe like finding the love of your life. But both
(33:39):
of those things are like additions, right, weight loss is
this thing, this subtraction that we believe is suddenly going
to open a whole new world to us, is suddenly
going to eliminate so much, I guess insecurity, so much
like hate that we have for ourselves. And I think
that right there is where the core problem in this lies.
The problem is that we have these delusions that take
(34:04):
over that insidiously tell us that if we just looked
like her, if we just lost that last killer or
fix this small thing, gain some more muscle, our whole
life would change. And so until then, there's nothing else
we can do until then, until this miracle occurs, until
this thing is fixed, we just kind of have to
(34:26):
endure a less than happy reality. This thinking, which I
think most commonly we don't even adopt by choice, also
causes us to very much intrinsically tie our value to
our appearance, and that is what influences our behaviors. If
(34:47):
your worth, if my worth is only activated when I
think I look good, when that is not the case,
why let myself be seen? Why believe I am deserving
of happiness? Why feel happy? And we spoke about briefly before,
but to return to an example of this that I
find particularly compelling is the experience of thinking that we
need to look a certain way before dating, that no
(35:09):
one could possibly love us at this size or this
shape or this composition. And so our appearance is like
almost this thing that we need to sort out before
putting ourselves out there, because we kind of realize that
when we put ourselves out into the romantic world, something
that we're going to be evaluated on is appearance. And
(35:32):
so the problem is is that we begin to firstly
overestimate the likelihood that others are going to respond to
our appearance in a negative way. Secondly, we underestimate our
ability to cope if they did. You know, if somebody
doesn't like what you look like, is that the end
of the world. If you have this fixation on your
appearance in this sense that it's tied to your worth,
(35:53):
then of course it's going to matter. But thirdly, we
really tend to discount any information which kind of suggests
that things are not going to go as bad as
we predicted. You know, when we're dating, we overlook all
the times that people did find us really attractive, We
overlook all the times that we were complemented, and we
just continue to think that if we were to be seen,
(36:15):
if we were to be perceived, we would not be loved.
And that just really really broke my heart to just
like even consider to even say just then, these negative
and false beliefs really follow us into every corner of
our lives. And the thing is is that they are
entirely incorrect. This idea that your appearance determines your worthiness
(36:39):
of love, your worthiness of opportunity, of success, of happiness
is a false belief. And you know how I know
that these beliefs are incorrect is because all of us
are thinking them, and none of us think that they
are true. For anybody but ourselves. None of us would
for a second believe that one of our friends, you know,
(37:01):
is unworthy of love or dates or affection because you know,
they didn't get a nose job when they were sixteen.
Not a single person listening to this would tell their
friend to not go for a job until they'd lost
a few kilos. You know, have you ever heard somebody
look at their partner and say, yeah, sorry, babe. You know,
(37:23):
I'm not going to say I love you until you
fix those freckles or until you like, gain some more muscle. No,
because that is ridiculous when we say it out loud,
When we say it in the context of somebody else,
that is ridiculous, And let's be honest, it's also incredibly
toxic and harsh and dangerous. We would never say that
to somebody else, and that's like a major red flag.
(37:45):
If somebody ever even suggested that, it would be like
the end of that relationship. And yet we have no
problem believing those things about ourselves, saying it to ourselves,
you know, demolishing our self esteem and self war the
way that we would never do to somebody that we loved.
And you know what's even worse is that it doesn't
(38:06):
even feel like it's in our control. You know, that
internal voice that in a critic, that is so loud
and that does so much harm is something that we
never quite feel like is part of us.
Speaker 1 (38:18):
Right.
Speaker 2 (38:19):
It feels like this external thing that is within us
that pops up that we didn't even consciously want to
hate our body or hate our appearance today, and yet
here we are doing it. So what's next? If we
have accepted that this is something that we are dealing
with that is holding us back, that is causing us
social anxiety, causing us avoidance, causing us to hold off
(38:41):
on life, what can we change? What can we actually do?
Speaker 1 (38:45):
Well?
Speaker 2 (38:45):
I drew some stuff from both the research and the psychology,
the science, but also my own experience is to really
guide us through. I think this past year for me
has been a journey of body recognition. And you know,
I say recognition rather than acceptance or positivity. And I
say that deliberately because I really wanted it to be
(39:06):
quite a neutral experience for me. You know, I didn't
need to learn to love every part of myself straight away.
That felt like a lot of pressure. I didn't need
to celebrate the things immediately that I, you know, disliked
for so many years because it felt artificial to you know,
do that overnight. It also felt like huge hill to climb.
(39:27):
So the first step was actually just getting comfortable with
recognizing what my body actually looked like, Actually recognizing, you know,
my features, not choosing to obscure them or cover them,
not looking away from mirrors, or buying clothes that I
knew were going to be the wrong size. You know,
I had this awful habit of always buying clothes that
(39:48):
were like, genuinely two to three sizes too big for
me because I didn't want to deal with the idea
of like not fitting into something and thinking that I
gained weight. Like I told myself to stop doing that.
I actually figured out what my size was, what I
actually looked like, and it didn't matter whether that was
a good thing or a bad thing. It was neutral.
It was an honest process of just again recognition. Like
(40:11):
the way I always put this to other people was
that I was observing a painting and the colors, the technique,
the shadows, the textures, and I wasn't saying anything about
whether I liked that painting or not. I wasn't saying
anything about how I would have done it differently. I
was just observing. The second element I think that comes
after being committed to seeing your body for what it
(40:32):
actually is, neither positively or negatively, is noticing your unhelpful appearance,
assumptions or judgments and really interrogating where they came from.
Was it because you experienced, as we talked about, negative
events in the past that came back and were tied
to kind of a trauma around appearance. Was it that
(40:55):
you know, where did you learn this from? What was
the experience where you first remember having a recognition that
you didn't like how you looked? And who told you that?
Who said something? What did you say to yourself? Is
there something that you tell yourself that you must or
should do in order to avoid judgment about your appearance?
Why is that? Why do you tell yourself, Oh, you know,
(41:17):
I can't wear those kinds of jeans, or like, oh no,
I can't go to work without wearing makeup. Oh you know, no,
I need to get my eyelashes done on my hair
dyed once a month. Why do you feel the need
to do that? What negative predictions do you have around
what would happen if you didn't do those things. And
(41:38):
to go one step further, it's you know, what is
the worst thing that could occur from somebody actually noticing
that floor that I try so hard to hide and
I try so hard to obscure. What is the worst thing, truly,
the worst thing that could come from somebody judging me
based on my appearance? They could not like you. I know,
(41:58):
it sounds so obvious to say that is the worst
up And they could just not like you. They could
not give you attention, They couldn't They might not give
you something that you want from them. But if that
is a friend, a love interest, a colleague, whoever, if
that is how they judge or they value you is
based on your appearance, if that is how they determine
what you are deserving of. I have a feeling that
(42:19):
that relationship wasn't going to last that long anyways, and
I have a feeling that it wasn't going to be
particularly fruitful. So is it actually a loss? Is it
truly a loss that this person couldn't look past the
most uninteresting thing about you, which is your appearance, to
the thing that really exists below the surface. This whole
(42:42):
process is about really taking your irrational beliefs about your
body to their final conclusion. What is the darkest place
that they could go? Stop there and really assess whether
that is a bad you know, as as bad as
you tend to believe, because often we just have this
belief and we avoid really thinking about what is that
sustaining it. And when we actually look at the underlying
(43:03):
fears that we have and we realize how untrue or
how unnecessary they are, we escape from our initial compulsions.
I would also say find a way to feel good
in your body that doesn't have the primary goal of
changing it. For example, when you exercise, instead of thinking
about calories, about muscle growth, about weight loss, broaden your
(43:25):
focus to how much better it makes you feel. Mentally,
when you're choosing clothes, instead of always thinking about what's
flattering first, think about what you would wear if you
were the person you most admired. What would you dress
the hottest person alive in and why not wear those
clothes yourself. Someone was telling me how they used to
really see doing their makeup as a way to conceal,
(43:48):
and now they see it as a way to be creative. Right.
It's that mindset shift of focusing on what makes you
feel confident despite the dysmorphia, and doing more of retraining
your brain to remember that your appearance is once again
not tied to your value. There is something that matters more,
(44:10):
and that is how you feel about the world. That's
feeling good in yourself. That's feeling healthy. That's your kindness,
your creativity, your intelligence, your wellbeing. All of those come above.
So some final tips and some lightning round advice. Every day,
try and find one thing to compliment about yourself that
is not looks based. To kind of steer your brain
(44:32):
and your mind away from centering appearance at the core
of everything else and compliment others as well. Create more
positive reactions in yourself by extending those kind of reactions
to those around you as well. Try and break out
of the narrative that your body and your appearance has
to be a constant work in progress. It can be
(44:54):
the final destination. Where you are right now can be
the end goal. If your body can do what it
needs to do, if it can have fun, if it
can move, if it can dance, if it can laugh,
if it can love, that's it great. It's done everything
that it needs to do. You don't need to improve
it beyond that, you don't require any anything more from it.
(45:16):
You don't have any further demands. Speak to your body
as if the person you are speaking to is that
childhood version of yourself who probably first encountered the belief
that they didn't like something about their appearance. If you were,
if you knew what you knew now, and you were
speaking to that child version of yourself in this moment,
(45:38):
what would you be saying And are the things that
you would be saying to that version of you, that
five six seven year old version of you, that sweet,
innocent person. Would you be saying to them what you
were saying to yourself? Would you be as harsh? Would
you be looking in the mirror seeing that childhood version
of you reflected back and saying, Wow, you really need
(46:00):
to do something about X, or you're not going to
be happy until you change why, or like that's revolting,
that's disgusting. Of course you wouldn't, So why are you
saying that to yourself now? That version of you, that innocent,
you know, unashamed version of you, still exists and still
deserves to be alive and present in the version of
(46:23):
you now that is an adult, and every time we
are harsh and critical and unkind to ourselves, I do
honestly believe that we kill a little part of us
that is quite pure and quite happy. So that is
kind of my final reminder for the day. I really
hope that this episode has brought you something, whether that
(46:45):
is information, whether that is peace, whether that is closure, community,
a sense that other people are going through what you
are going through. I promise you are not alone. This
is so much more common, and I don't know if
that's a good thing, but at least it doesn't feel
as solitary, and I just hope that you're taking care
of yourself and that you're choosing to be kinder to
(47:07):
yourself as a result. So again, thank you for listening.
If you did enjoy this episode, please feel free to
leave a five star review on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, wherever
you are listening right now. It really does help the
show to grow and to reach new people. Make sure
you are following along. If you liked this episode, we
have hundreds more that might be of use. But whatever
(47:31):
you're going through, and if you have a suggestion, if
you have feedback, if you have something you want to
say about this episode. You can follow me at that
Psychology podcast. We would love to hear from you. Until
next time, be kind to yourself. Please be gentle with
yourself and we will talk soon.
Hello everybody, and welcome back to the Psychology of Your Twenties,
the podcast where we talk through some of the big
life changes and transitions of our twenties and what they
mean for our psychology.
Speaker 2 (00:23):
Hello everybody, Welcome back to the show. Welcome back to
the podcast. New listeners, old listeners. Wherever you are in
the world, it is so great to have you here,
back for another episode as we, of course break down
the psychology of our twenties. Of your twenties. Before we begin,
a brief trigger warning that this episode does deal with
(00:46):
some fairly in depth discussions around weight loss, weight gain, appearance,
and eating disorders. So please do just take a second
to consider whether you are in a healthy mental space,
a healthy mindset to be listening to this right now.
This episode will still be here in a few days,
in a week, in a few months, so you can
(01:09):
always return to it when the time is right, when
the time is better. Let's get into it today. We
are going to be talking about a pretty vulnerable topic,
one that has I think especially serious implications for our
mental health, both in our twenties and beyond and even before,
and it can also just be such a present and
(01:29):
overwhelming shadow in our lives, our thoughts, our feelings, our
opinions about our body do have this incredible capacity to
really influence every other area of our daily life, of
our existence, of our values, of our relationships, and yet
we really do tend to kind of keep it out
of the light of day. We really avoid discussing this
(01:53):
openly because I think of, you know, well, shame and
how hard it is to come out and say, you know,
at the moment, I really dislike my body, I really
hate some part of me, or I'm fixated on my
appearance and I don't know how to stop it. I
think it's also what it comes down to is embarrassment
as well as shame, the sense that caring this much
(02:14):
about your looks is somehow, you know, vapid or vain,
when actually it goes so much deeper than what other
people might want to label it. It is and can
be very disordered, a very disordered pattern of thinking, and
beyond that, something that is hugely and largely beyond our control.
(02:35):
I've come to realize the more I also choose to
speak more openly about this experience, how many of us
are struggling with some form of negative and harsh thinking
about our bodies, about our weight, about our appearance. But
you wouldn't think that given how much we have trained
ourselves in society has trained us to be silent about it.
(03:00):
Beyond that, it hasn't just trained us to be silent,
it's also trained us to view and treat our body
like it is a constant, working progress rather than something
that we can just be satisfied with as it is.
So consider this your safe space. We're going to discuss
everything to do with this today, specifically the topic of
(03:21):
body dysmorphia and what that actually means. I think we
hear a lot of people talk about how you know
they are dissatisfied with their appearance, with their weight. Is
that always body dysmorphia? Or can we just have symptoms
without a diagnosable condition. The other point that people mention
is how it's really difficult to even be able to
(03:42):
tell what we look like. How a lot of us
are really struggling with just a genuine acknowledgment of our
appearance and how other people see us. Is that body
dysmorphia or is that something else? What is the actual
I would say pathology and criteria behind BDD body dysmorphic disorder.
(04:03):
So we're going to discuss all of that, including the
origins of this condition, what makes us more susceptible, including
the impact of toxic gym and diet culture, how it
manifests the impact, but also some stories from you guys,
the listeners, who were really vulnerable and open about their
personal experiences. And I also just want to talk more
(04:23):
generally about what it means to really dislike your body
without having BDD, and why that is becoming increasingly more common,
and what we can actually do about it. What are
ways of interrupting this really negative belief system that our
appearance is really at the core of our worth all
(04:43):
matters more than it does. So we have so much
to talk about, so much research, so much science, and
of course so much psychology. So without further ado, let
us get into it. Body dysmorphia is one of those
conditions that I think we've all heard about, which is
(05:04):
definitely enlargely misunderstood. So to start off with, I just
want to get our kind of basics downpat what actually
is BDD. So BDD body dysmorphic disorder is a mental
health condition, and it's a lot more than feeling occasionally
negative about your body. It is an entire pattern roundabout
(05:28):
cycle maze, inescapable maze of negative emotions, negative perceptions, and
negative feelings that are all directed towards your appearance. And
what it really involves is an obsessive focus and shame
and anxiety around some perceived flaw in our appearance. This
often very small feature of us. It could be, you know,
(05:52):
some feature of our face, our physique, muscle mass, our skin,
combination of all of those things, our weight, our height,
and this feature becomes a preoccupation, regardless of whether it
is real or imagined, no matter how small it is.
So when I say real or imagined, I mean that
this thing that we really dislike about ourselves. You know,
(06:14):
it could be so tiny and obscure that no one
else would ever notice it. But for us, it feels
like a huge part of who we are. It feels
like we exist in the world, and as we are existing,
this huge spotlight is highlighting to ourselves and everybody around us,
(06:35):
this feature that we really don't like. Even when others
say that we look amazing, they compliment us, they say
we look lovely, They reassure us that no one is
noticing this floor that we are focused on. We can't
believe them. There is a part of us that is
quite honestly delusional and constantly tells us that all these
(06:58):
other people must be lying, just can't see it, they
must be blind in some way. And so we continue
to have this like hyper focus on this floor, and
we normally resort to repetitive behaviors in order to kind
of self soothe or regain some control over this aspect
of our appearance that is causing mental tension. So these
(07:19):
behaviors are things like always checking ourselves in the mirror,
constant mirror checking, constant grooming and touching or skin picking,
only choosing clothes that will hide this feature or a
part of yourself. So these are actually called BDD safety behaviors,
and they're one step above avoidance, whereby they make us
(07:39):
feel like we have control over what part of us
is being made visible to others, and therefore we can
control the judgments that we assume people are making about
us based on this feature. So it's not just that
we have a fixation on this floor. It's not just
that we have this personal spotlight. It's also that in
(08:01):
order to be meeting the criteria of BDD, you have
to become obsessed with how you can fix it. In
our minds, if the floor was to disappear or suddenly
go away, so would all of our mental distress. And
so we are always searching or coming up with a
plan to erase this part of us, whether that is
through excessive exercise, intense skincare routines, or cosmetic surgery. So
(08:29):
cosmetic surgery has a really important kind of place in
this discussion, now that I've kind of brought it up,
what I found was really interesting when I was really
digging into this research is that whilst only about I
would say three to five percent of the general population
has BDD, and that's even quite a generous statistic, it's
(08:51):
probably sitting at around three point five amongst people who
pursue cosmetic interventions, not just surgery but fillers and actions,
non invasive procedures, that prevalence of BDD in that population
rises to almost twenty five percent. So, depending on how
you feel about cosmetic surgery, you may think that this
(09:11):
could provide some relief to people with BDD. It's almost
like a treatment, right, you know, if they're experiencing so
much shame, associated with their appearance. Here is this fix.
But on the other hand, this is a multi billion
dollar industry that makes its money on exacerbating and preying
on these insecurities and the purported ability to kind of
(09:33):
fix them. We have to remember BDD is a mental disorder,
not a physical disorder. The problem is with cosmetic intervention
is that it actually often makes people with body dysmorphic
disorder feel worse or actually just the same. After the procedure.
They may even become more preoccupied with the perceived floor
(09:54):
because it has just changed, it hasn't gone away, and
they can seek further medic procedures, leading to at times
an addiction. So something that really fascinated me about this
kind of interaction between body dysmorphic disorder and cosmetic surgery
is the study that said that, yes, a lot of
people who pursue cosmetic surgery would actually make the criteria
(10:17):
for this mental condition, but more so, they are actually
also the people that are most likely to take legal
action against surgeons because even when the surgeon in their
mind has fixed this flaw, you know, it's it hasn't
gone away, just because it's you know, physical form has
changed this feature of us is once again a preoccupation
(10:39):
that it's coming from something that is kind of mentally
disturbed or mentally I don't like to say broken. Mentally
different is probably a better way mentally disordered, right, It's
just not an accurate reflection of what we actually look like.
It's not an accurate reflection of our physical forms, So
it doesn't actually matter if that feature of us changes.
(10:59):
So obviously not everybody with BDD is going to seek
out cosmetic surgery, but I think it does really reveal
to us how hard it is to control such a
loud and persistent thoughts about our body, and why it
does seem that drastic measures will be the only solution
to silence them. This is often why as well BDD
(11:21):
is compared to parallel disorders like OCD and eating disorders.
I feel like that one might have come to mind
for you almost immediately, And these disorders in particular have
a high chromobility. With BDD, that means that often not often,
but you know, it's not uncommon for people to have
a dual diagnosis. So for these two things to be
(11:44):
occurring at the same time, for somebody to have BDD
and an eating disorder or OCD and BDD. So the
comparison to OCD really emerges because of the excessive sixuation
which results in compulsive behaviors, which really kind of follows
a similar format to how OCD manifests. However, with you know,
(12:04):
body dysmorphia, it's really solely based on an obsession and
a compulsion to do with appearance. So the link to
eating disorders is also quite a common one. If someone
is that disgusted i would say, almost tormented by their appearance.
Sometimes this can really manifest in disordered eating habits, you know,
(12:27):
wanting to control this aspect of yourself through whatever behavior
or means necessary. But it's also important to remember that
a lot of people with BEDD do actually just have
quite normal eating patterns, like you can have BDD without
abnormal eating. It's also interesting because people who are experiencing
(12:48):
anorexia or binge eating disorder or bolimia, yes, they may
find that this has resulted from initial feelings of like
extreme dissatisfaction and fixation with some perceived flaw. But also
another component of this is that sometimes there is you know,
behaviors like restricting food or excessive exercising or purging can
(13:10):
also emerge simply from a place of control, not just
bodily modification, which is why I think BDD is really
deserving of its own separate diagnosis. All right, so let's
talk about risk factors here. There are obviously some people
who are a lot more susceptible to this than others,
like most mental health conditions, And when we talk about
(13:33):
mental health conditions and we talk about who's at risk,
the biggest thing it mostly comes down to, or always
comes back to in some sense, is family history. If
someone in your close or your immediate family has endured BDD,
your chances go up quite a bit. This, You know,
(13:54):
it comes down to genetic predisposition, but also exposure and
life experiences. You know, if that individual with BDD was
a parent, their own experience with this condition is going
to influence how they raise you and how they parent you,
as much as they may try for it not to.
(14:15):
You know, if this kind of condition goes untreated, it
does have the impact of bleeding into all these other
aspects of our lives, including our relationships. So, for example,
I heard from someone who spoke about how their mother
was obsessed with slimness for all her life. She would
endure these like drastic diets. She got multiple surgeries in
(14:38):
the pursuit of this small body, this small physique. She
would always comment on her weight to others. She really
never seemed happy regardless of the results, So definitely meeting
the criteria for BDD here and as a child, this
person spoke about how her mother really implanted a lot
of those beliefs in her through the way that she,
(15:00):
you know, controlled her as a parent. She would, you know,
control her food. For example, she would choose flattering clothes
and colors for her and tell her these are the
colors that you should wear, or you can't wear those things,
they make you look fat. She was constantly commenting on
her skin, especially as she hit puberty and developed acne.
And this person said to me, you know, two years ago,
(15:23):
I got the same diagnosis that my mum had gotten.
And sometimes I think how much of it was genetic
and how much of it was environmental? And was my
you know, the environment of my upbringing. Because in those situations,
how are you meant to develop a healthy sense of
self esteem? How are you meant to detach your appearance
(15:43):
from your self worth? When that kind of preoccupation is
being passed down to you by the person in your
life that matters the most to you as a child,
which is your caregiver. This kind of example, and I
don't like to say example, this person's experienceerience, Yeah, they're
very much personal experience. Really demonstrates to me as well
(16:06):
how negative life experiences also play a really crucial role,
especially experiences like childhood bullying, like neglect, like teasing, like abuse.
So I actually have a story about this that is
from my own life that I've never really shared before
on the show. You know, it never really came up,
(16:27):
but it is one of my earliest and most lucid
memories from childhood. It's also one of those moments that
really goes to show how, you know, passing words can
really leave quite a lifelong mark. So when I was
around seven, six or seven years old, I used to
always go to out of after school hours care Like
(16:47):
I don't know if that's a thing everywhere in the world,
but you know, both my parents were working, and so
I like stayed at the school a little bit longer
with like other kids whose parents were also working or
also had things to do. And we were watching this
movie with a bunch of other kids called the little princess,
and this boy turns to me and he goes, you know,
(17:09):
you would look just like her if you weren't so fat.
I have never been able to shake those words, even
to this day. They have left such an imprint on me.
It was like the first time that I ever felt
shame about my body. And I think when I was
(17:29):
a teenager. Now as an adult, my whole life, my
weight has been a point of fixation for me. There
has never been a period of my life where I've
been satisfied with how I look or how I weigh,
how I feel in my body, and I often wonder
whether that would have been different if that hadn't happened,
(17:50):
because it was almost like this new you know, It
was almost like that was the beginning, Like I became
conscious of everything that I could change that I didn't
like myself, and the fact that people could observe these
things that I didn't like about myself and could make
judgments or mean comments to me about my appearance, and
(18:10):
it mattered. It's also really interesting to me how that
continues to come up as a problem for me in
my life. I posted like this random video on my
Instagram a few weeks ago. If you follow me over there,
I think you'll know which one it is. And it
reached an audience that I basically like didn't intend it
to like. It went semi viral, and the audience was
you know, men in their like thirties and forties who
(18:34):
didn't you didn't agree with what I was saying. And
as always goes with those situations, if like a middle
aged man doesn't agree with what you're saying, the first
thing they're going to resort to doing is making a
comment about your weight or your appearance. And oh my gosh,
did I not get hundreds of them? And they were awful,
And the only thing I could think of was, oh
(18:55):
my god, this is just like this all over again.
It brought me right back to that version of me
who was first really made aware that her body wasn't
just there to climb and to run and to play
and to giggle and to eat yummy foods like it
was there to be judged. Those early life experiences might
seem very far in the past, but they definitely linger,
(19:18):
especially since BDD typically starts, you know, in our early
teen years when everything is so formative, but also when
those childhood experiences and memories are a lot more fresh
and we are a lot more impressionable. So there are
some other risk factors, including personality traits like perfectionism. If
we are, of course preoccupied with being flawless in every
(19:42):
other area of our life, of course our appearance is
going to come into that. You know, the existence of
even a tiny perceived floor, a bad skin day, stretch
marks a facial feature that can really disrupt our whole
identity and be quite distressing. I will say something that
is not a fact to hear is gender. So with
(20:03):
eating disorders, for example, there is you know, typically a
much higher prevalence amongst women. It's normally around three times
the rates that we would see in men for things
like anorexia and bolimia. But for BDD men and women,
people of all genders are influenced the same, It just
(20:23):
expresses itself quite differently. One area that this is really
evident to me is when it comes to weight. Women
typically want to be thinner, whereas men want more muscle.
They're preoccupied with gaining weight. Obviously this isn't always the case,
but I do think that it's a distinction that we
can really see when we just look around ourselves, when
(20:45):
we just compare what our male friends versus our female
friends complain about when it comes to their size. So
in the DSM there is even a specifier around this
particular kind of BDD that results from muscles dysmorphia, whereby
somebody is really engrossed with the idea that their body
(21:05):
build is too small. They are not muscular enough to
be seen as I don't know, manly, or to be
seen as big enough, or worthy enough, or like strong enough,
whatever it is. This, in my mind can also be
really attributed to, I would say, a rise in toxic
gym culture and this idea of big erexia. Now, this
(21:26):
is a term that I learned from a recent article
by the Guardian and they talk about like how you know,
we all know what anorexia is. This is a play
on words, and anorexia is typically associated with the pursuit
of smallness and thinness, whereas big erexia is this pursuit
of being as huge as possible. And in this article
(21:47):
they spoke to some you know, guys and some women
as well, but mainly men about the lengths that they
are willing to go to to achieve this, and how
no matter how many people say, wow, like you are
so huge, huge, You're massive, Like every time they look
in the mirror, they do not see that. They see
themselves as tiny. And this one man in this article
(22:09):
was talking about how he would like eat the only
thing he would eat would be like chicken breasts and
protein sources. And he was like, I looked amazing, Like
in my mind, I looked so huge, but I was
so unhealthy, and like his kidneys started failing and his
livers started failing. And I think that that really comes
(22:31):
down to this crucial point, which is that this obsession
with a muscular body is largely ignored because it's seen
as healthy or a worthwhile bodily pursuit. Because you know,
what's unhealthy about strength, and what's unhealthy about spending time
in the gym, what's unhealthy with fueling your body in
this opt optimal way, what's unhealthy about protein? And I
(22:54):
think a lot of people experiencing this, witnessing this would
be quick to highlight how easy it is for this
to tip into very unhealthy and maladaptive terrain. How this
is just another version of an unrealistic or an extreme
expectation for our body image that is promoted by certain
(23:17):
in groups and certain cultures and certain aspects of society.
So this distinction, this general distinction is I think between
weight loss and weight gain for different genders is essentially
a reflection of what society expects from men and women,
you know, the beauty ideals that each gender is very
much forced to endure. And we can't ignore that component,
(23:38):
the influence of our social conditioning and how we have
been taught to hate our bodies, not instinctially but through
external influence. So BDD, I think, is what I would
call a modern day disorder because it really has arisen
mainly in the last one hundred years, probably even twenty
to fifty years specifically, and it's really emerged, as some
(24:01):
researchers would say, from the fact that we now have
more comparison points than ever to judge ourselves based on,
and we are increasingly being exposed to this messaging around
what we should look like and what is not desirable.
This is because things like TV, advertising, social media, they
have made us more aware of the social norms around
(24:23):
attraction and what society sees as beautiful or not. Secondly,
they've exposed us to what other people look like, meaning,
of course, more opportunities to come up short and compare.
And finally, you know, the media uses looks and appearance
as something through which they can influence and sell us things,
And so let's be honest, they benefit from us not
(24:45):
feeling great. They benefit from us seeing a beautiful person
on TV and wanting whatever skincare product that they're using,
or seeing you know, a huge, huge guy on some
superhero movie and admiring not just this plotline and this
narrative around him being a hero, but the fact that
he looks so great and the fact that we could
(25:07):
copy his work out routine, and the fact that he
is like this really jacked cool guy. And the sociocultural
theory of self esteem would tell you that the messages
given to us by the media about the importance of
appearance and what is hot and what is attractive and
what looks good, they are so easily internalized by us
(25:30):
as individuals, and they also so easily influence how we
treat ourselves, our standards, our habits, and our behaviors. I
think as we feel more pressure to conform with that,
we become more aware once again of the aspects of
ourselves that we feel will be judged based on prevailing
(25:52):
norms of attraction. If I am not thinn does that
mean I will be unhappy? If I I'm not bigger,
If I don't fix my nose, if I don't fix
my skin, does that mean that I will never find love?
Will they consider me for this job? If my hair
is thinning, If I'm too frail, if whatever, my teeth
(26:16):
aren't straight? And all of it comes back to this idea,
this irrational belief that the secret to happiness is our appearance.
I want to share another person's experience here because I
think they articulated it so well, in a much better
way than I ever could. I've struggled with body dysmorphia
(26:37):
and eating disorders since I was twelve. I'm twenty two now.
Last year I started recovery and treatment after being at
my lowest with my symptoms, so I had the urge
of seeking help. It's been a tough journey and very
difficult to accept the diagnosis. The mind blowing thing is
that almost my entire adolescence and early adult years, I
(26:57):
thought life was about my weight, appearance, and body composition,
and I made it till now just like that, fitting
so perfectly into society and no one noticed that something
was going on. What I'd like to emphasize is that
just because weight loss and obsession with appearance is culturally
normalized in our society doesn't mean that it is healthy
(27:20):
or even pleasurable at all. I've been in this mental
prison for years, losing time, missing experiences people that I
will never regain. I really hope that we could move
towards a more inclusive society in terms of body norms,
to not feel like the only way to fit in
is through a stereotype of beauty that is unachievable, unachievable.
(27:43):
I love that this individual. Firstly, thank you so much
for sharing and it's that was like kind of emotional
when I first read that. But secondly, I like that
you finished on that because so many of of the
examples that fuel our body dysmorphia are the one percent
to like crazy amazing genetics, are due to something that
(28:04):
we could never change, and at times or even due
to somebody who themselves has body dysmorphia and who is
you know, undergoing some you know, crazy surgeries and crazy
efforts to fix the part of themselves that we are
sitting back and admiring. So I really think that it
is such a weird mess around where if everybody's experiencing this,
(28:29):
the person that we are probably comparing ourselves too, is
probably looking at us or looking at somebody else and
wanting what they have as well. So, you know, the
norm is constantly evolving, and yet we're constantly chasing the
sense of again that appearance equals happiness. All right, we're
going to take a short break, but when we come back,
I want to discuss whether body dysmorphia is more prevalent
(28:51):
than we think, but also how we can kind of
move through some of the stress, dissatisfaction, worry, anxiety around
our appearance stay with us. There is an important distinction
here between BDD and having the occasional negative perception about
(29:15):
our body, and it is an important one because I
would go so far as to say that nearly every
single one of us has something that they want to
change about how we look, but we aren't really going
to drastic measures to do that. You know, maybe that
doesn't qualify us as having a mental health condition. However,
I think just because it's not as intense as it
(29:36):
is for people with body dysmorphia doesn't make hating your
body easy. It is so difficult to wake up in
a body that you increasingly do not like or find
problem with, because that is your home, you know, as
the incredible Emma Thompson says, that is your vessel. There
is no escaping that you will exist in this body,
(29:59):
and no one else says until the day that you die.
So hating how you look and how you feel quickly
evolves into hating yourself almost instantly, because the two things
you know, yourself or your soul and your appearance your body,
they're very hard to separate. So I wanted to hear
from you guys, the listeners around the world around just
(30:21):
how many of us are experiencing this kind of daily dislike,
how endemic it is, because whilst I think we can
all recognize the universality of warry and dissatisfaction towards our appearance,
I don't think we talk about it enough. But I
think that having a general and a more like kind
of bird's eye view of just how many of us
are going through this is quite comforting. So I kind
(30:44):
of wanted to just siphon it down to the area
of weight loss because I feel like or weight change,
more like weight loss or weight change, because I think
that weight is something that most of us have a
general insecurity about compared to more unique things about ourselves
that are probably different between each of us. You know,
it's kind of hard to talk about, like, oh, would
you want to change that unique scar or would you
(31:05):
want to change that do you want to know his job?
Like when people you know, that's yeah, big insecurity, but
not as prominent as weight is for all of us. So,
you know, it's kind of sad to say it, but
weight dissatisfaction is a bit of a human equalizer. That's
why I chose it. It's out of almost two thousand
of you, seventy percent of you said that in the
(31:26):
past year you had thought about losing weight nearly every month.
And for those of you who said every month, shockingly,
it was like forty seven percent of that faction who
said that you thought about it every day every day,
some nearly fifty percent of you said every day that
weight loss is on your mind, clouding your thoughts and
(31:50):
your judgment. I want you to like genuinely think about
this for a second. Is there any other warrior insecurity
that we all share as much as that one. You know,
as we are all going about our daily lives, we
each have our own unique set of problems. We each
have you know, work deadlines, we each have relationship issues,
we each have small anxieties, small to do lists. And
(32:13):
the one thing that seems to you know, bind us
all together is that in this small reality that is
our own reality, all of us are sharing this collective
thought that we don't like how we look and that
we want to lose weight. Like I was thinking about
this the other day when I was on the train
and I was looking around. It was like a pack train,
and I was like, how many people here right now
(32:34):
have thought about dieting today? How many people on this
train have, you know, put on their Janes in the
morning and been like, oh gosh, I really probably should
lose a few like And that's just crazy to me
because you look at all these people, and you know,
if the statistics that I got from you guys are
saying it, that's like fifty percent of those people on
(32:56):
that train have thought about it that day. Yeah, I
wouldn't have been able to tell you that that's what
they were thinking. And yet I would have thought that
I would be the only one, because our own lives
just feel so unique and so isolated. Beyond that, the
other interesting question I asked you, guys was whether you
think that weight loss or a change in your size
(33:19):
weight game for some people, would make you happier, And
sixty seven percent of you said yes. Is there any
other factor in our life in which two thirds of
us would put our hands up and say, if that changed,
I would be happier. Maybe like winning a million dollars,
maybe like finding the love of your life. But both
(33:39):
of those things are like additions, right, weight loss is
this thing, this subtraction that we believe is suddenly going
to open a whole new world to us, is suddenly
going to eliminate so much, I guess insecurity, so much
like hate that we have for ourselves. And I think
that right there is where the core problem in this lies.
The problem is that we have these delusions that take
(34:04):
over that insidiously tell us that if we just looked
like her, if we just lost that last killer or
fix this small thing, gain some more muscle, our whole
life would change. And so until then, there's nothing else
we can do until then, until this miracle occurs, until
this thing is fixed, we just kind of have to
(34:26):
endure a less than happy reality. This thinking, which I
think most commonly we don't even adopt by choice, also
causes us to very much intrinsically tie our value to
our appearance, and that is what influences our behaviors. If
(34:47):
your worth, if my worth is only activated when I
think I look good, when that is not the case,
why let myself be seen? Why believe I am deserving
of happiness? Why feel happy? And we spoke about briefly before,
but to return to an example of this that I
find particularly compelling is the experience of thinking that we
need to look a certain way before dating, that no
(35:09):
one could possibly love us at this size or this
shape or this composition. And so our appearance is like
almost this thing that we need to sort out before
putting ourselves out there, because we kind of realize that
when we put ourselves out into the romantic world, something
that we're going to be evaluated on is appearance. And
(35:32):
so the problem is is that we begin to firstly
overestimate the likelihood that others are going to respond to
our appearance in a negative way. Secondly, we underestimate our
ability to cope if they did. You know, if somebody
doesn't like what you look like, is that the end
of the world. If you have this fixation on your
appearance in this sense that it's tied to your worth,
(35:53):
then of course it's going to matter. But thirdly, we
really tend to discount any information which kind of suggests
that things are not going to go as bad as
we predicted. You know, when we're dating, we overlook all
the times that people did find us really attractive, We
overlook all the times that we were complemented, and we
just continue to think that if we were to be seen,
(36:15):
if we were to be perceived, we would not be loved.
And that just really really broke my heart to just
like even consider to even say just then, these negative
and false beliefs really follow us into every corner of
our lives. And the thing is is that they are
entirely incorrect. This idea that your appearance determines your worthiness
(36:39):
of love, your worthiness of opportunity, of success, of happiness
is a false belief. And you know how I know
that these beliefs are incorrect is because all of us
are thinking them, and none of us think that they
are true. For anybody but ourselves. None of us would
for a second believe that one of our friends, you know,
(37:01):
is unworthy of love or dates or affection because you know,
they didn't get a nose job when they were sixteen.
Not a single person listening to this would tell their
friend to not go for a job until they'd lost
a few kilos. You know, have you ever heard somebody
look at their partner and say, yeah, sorry, babe. You know,
(37:23):
I'm not going to say I love you until you
fix those freckles or until you like, gain some more muscle. No,
because that is ridiculous when we say it out loud,
When we say it in the context of somebody else,
that is ridiculous, And let's be honest, it's also incredibly
toxic and harsh and dangerous. We would never say that
to somebody else, and that's like a major red flag.
(37:45):
If somebody ever even suggested that, it would be like
the end of that relationship. And yet we have no
problem believing those things about ourselves, saying it to ourselves,
you know, demolishing our self esteem and self war the
way that we would never do to somebody that we loved.
And you know what's even worse is that it doesn't
(38:06):
even feel like it's in our control. You know, that
internal voice that in a critic, that is so loud
and that does so much harm is something that we
never quite feel like is part of us.
Speaker 1 (38:18):
Right.
Speaker 2 (38:19):
It feels like this external thing that is within us
that pops up that we didn't even consciously want to
hate our body or hate our appearance today, and yet
here we are doing it. So what's next? If we
have accepted that this is something that we are dealing
with that is holding us back, that is causing us
social anxiety, causing us avoidance, causing us to hold off
(38:41):
on life, what can we change? What can we actually do?
Speaker 1 (38:45):
Well?
Speaker 2 (38:45):
I drew some stuff from both the research and the psychology,
the science, but also my own experience is to really
guide us through. I think this past year for me
has been a journey of body recognition. And you know,
I say recognition rather than acceptance or positivity. And I
say that deliberately because I really wanted it to be
(39:06):
quite a neutral experience for me. You know, I didn't
need to learn to love every part of myself straight away.
That felt like a lot of pressure. I didn't need
to celebrate the things immediately that I, you know, disliked
for so many years because it felt artificial to you know,
do that overnight. It also felt like huge hill to climb.
(39:27):
So the first step was actually just getting comfortable with
recognizing what my body actually looked like, Actually recognizing, you know,
my features, not choosing to obscure them or cover them,
not looking away from mirrors, or buying clothes that I
knew were going to be the wrong size. You know,
I had this awful habit of always buying clothes that
(39:48):
were like, genuinely two to three sizes too big for
me because I didn't want to deal with the idea
of like not fitting into something and thinking that I
gained weight. Like I told myself to stop doing that.
I actually figured out what my size was, what I
actually looked like, and it didn't matter whether that was
a good thing or a bad thing. It was neutral.
It was an honest process of just again recognition. Like
(40:11):
the way I always put this to other people was
that I was observing a painting and the colors, the technique,
the shadows, the textures, and I wasn't saying anything about
whether I liked that painting or not. I wasn't saying
anything about how I would have done it differently. I
was just observing. The second element I think that comes
after being committed to seeing your body for what it
(40:32):
actually is, neither positively or negatively, is noticing your unhelpful appearance,
assumptions or judgments and really interrogating where they came from.
Was it because you experienced, as we talked about, negative
events in the past that came back and were tied
to kind of a trauma around appearance. Was it that
(40:55):
you know, where did you learn this from? What was
the experience where you first remember having a recognition that
you didn't like how you looked? And who told you that?
Who said something? What did you say to yourself? Is
there something that you tell yourself that you must or
should do in order to avoid judgment about your appearance?
Why is that? Why do you tell yourself, Oh, you know,
(41:17):
I can't wear those kinds of jeans, or like, oh no,
I can't go to work without wearing makeup. Oh you know, no,
I need to get my eyelashes done on my hair
dyed once a month. Why do you feel the need
to do that? What negative predictions do you have around
what would happen if you didn't do those things. And
(41:38):
to go one step further, it's you know, what is
the worst thing that could occur from somebody actually noticing
that floor that I try so hard to hide and
I try so hard to obscure. What is the worst thing, truly,
the worst thing that could come from somebody judging me
based on my appearance? They could not like you. I know,
(41:58):
it sounds so obvious to say that is the worst
up And they could just not like you. They could
not give you attention, They couldn't They might not give
you something that you want from them. But if that
is a friend, a love interest, a colleague, whoever, if
that is how they judge or they value you is
based on your appearance, if that is how they determine
what you are deserving of. I have a feeling that
(42:19):
that relationship wasn't going to last that long anyways, and
I have a feeling that it wasn't going to be
particularly fruitful. So is it actually a loss? Is it
truly a loss that this person couldn't look past the
most uninteresting thing about you, which is your appearance, to
the thing that really exists below the surface. This whole
(42:42):
process is about really taking your irrational beliefs about your
body to their final conclusion. What is the darkest place
that they could go? Stop there and really assess whether
that is a bad you know, as as bad as
you tend to believe, because often we just have this
belief and we avoid really thinking about what is that
sustaining it. And when we actually look at the underlying
(43:03):
fears that we have and we realize how untrue or
how unnecessary they are, we escape from our initial compulsions.
I would also say find a way to feel good
in your body that doesn't have the primary goal of
changing it. For example, when you exercise, instead of thinking
about calories, about muscle growth, about weight loss, broaden your
(43:25):
focus to how much better it makes you feel. Mentally,
when you're choosing clothes, instead of always thinking about what's
flattering first, think about what you would wear if you
were the person you most admired. What would you dress
the hottest person alive in and why not wear those
clothes yourself. Someone was telling me how they used to
really see doing their makeup as a way to conceal,
(43:48):
and now they see it as a way to be creative. Right.
It's that mindset shift of focusing on what makes you
feel confident despite the dysmorphia, and doing more of retraining
your brain to remember that your appearance is once again
not tied to your value. There is something that matters more,
(44:10):
and that is how you feel about the world. That's
feeling good in yourself. That's feeling healthy. That's your kindness,
your creativity, your intelligence, your wellbeing. All of those come above.
So some final tips and some lightning round advice. Every day,
try and find one thing to compliment about yourself that
is not looks based. To kind of steer your brain
(44:32):
and your mind away from centering appearance at the core
of everything else and compliment others as well. Create more
positive reactions in yourself by extending those kind of reactions
to those around you as well. Try and break out
of the narrative that your body and your appearance has
to be a constant work in progress. It can be
(44:54):
the final destination. Where you are right now can be
the end goal. If your body can do what it
needs to do, if it can have fun, if it
can move, if it can dance, if it can laugh,
if it can love, that's it great. It's done everything
that it needs to do. You don't need to improve
it beyond that, you don't require any anything more from it.
(45:16):
You don't have any further demands. Speak to your body
as if the person you are speaking to is that
childhood version of yourself who probably first encountered the belief
that they didn't like something about their appearance. If you were,
if you knew what you knew now, and you were
speaking to that child version of yourself in this moment,
(45:38):
what would you be saying And are the things that
you would be saying to that version of you, that
five six seven year old version of you, that sweet,
innocent person. Would you be saying to them what you
were saying to yourself? Would you be as harsh? Would
you be looking in the mirror seeing that childhood version
of you reflected back and saying, Wow, you really need
(46:00):
to do something about X, or you're not going to
be happy until you change why, or like that's revolting,
that's disgusting. Of course you wouldn't, So why are you
saying that to yourself now? That version of you, that innocent,
you know, unashamed version of you, still exists and still
deserves to be alive and present in the version of
(46:23):
you now that is an adult, and every time we
are harsh and critical and unkind to ourselves, I do
honestly believe that we kill a little part of us
that is quite pure and quite happy. So that is
kind of my final reminder for the day. I really
hope that this episode has brought you something, whether that
(46:45):
is information, whether that is peace, whether that is closure, community,
a sense that other people are going through what you
are going through. I promise you are not alone. This
is so much more common, and I don't know if
that's a good thing, but at least it doesn't feel
as solitary, and I just hope that you're taking care
of yourself and that you're choosing to be kinder to
(47:07):
yourself as a result. So again, thank you for listening.
If you did enjoy this episode, please feel free to
leave a five star review on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, wherever
you are listening right now. It really does help the
show to grow and to reach new people. Make sure
you are following along. If you liked this episode, we
have hundreds more that might be of use. But whatever
(47:31):
you're going through, and if you have a suggestion, if
you have feedback, if you have something you want to
say about this episode. You can follow me at that
Psychology podcast. We would love to hear from you. Until
next time, be kind to yourself. Please be gentle with
yourself and we will talk soon.
Host
Jemma Sbeghen
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