When it comes to body image, there's a secret that not many people talk about. And here it is: body image issues are not really about your body at all.

How often do we hear "I don’t like my body, I don’t like how I look, so I want to lose weight". Many of us hope that losing weight will be a miracle solution, that once we lose the weight (once and only once the weight is gone) we’ll start to miraculously love our body, feel good about our looks, and feel beautiful and sexy.

However, if you’ve ever tried to lose weight in the hope that you’ll finally love what you see in the mirror you’ve probably realised that loving your new body is not a given. It's quite common that even after losing a lot of weight, we still see our body as it was before, and we struggle to see our new reflection. Accepting this new body doesn’t come without any work on your mind. And do you know why? Because it was never about your body.

So isn’t it strange that most people’s first reaction when they don’t like their body (or start disliking a specific body part) is to change their body? We've truly be conditioned to think that this is what we need to do when we don't like ourselves. But let's dig deeper!

1) Your perception vs reality

As I’ve mentioned in the intro, what your body looks like doesn’t really have anything to do with your body image. Have you ever met someone who has a body completely different than yours, who might not fit society’s beauty standards, and is wayyy more confident than you are? They didn’t wait for their body weight to drop to feel confident, they’ve accepted it (to a degree, we never know what is happening in someone’s mind, so we always prone kindness and respect!).

But body image is not just your reflection in the mirror, it’s about how you interpret and perceive what you see. Another example of this is, have you ever come across a woman who you deemed has the perfect weight and perfect figure and body, fitting society’s beauty standards, and who was still struggling with her looks? Who still complained about her arms or her stomach or any other body part? That’s another proof that perception is the issue, not what you see in the mirror.

Your beauty standards, given to you by society, by your family, by people around you, are what you judge what you see in the mirror against. You take something that’s just a fact, what you look like, and you instantly start to judge against what you’ve been led to believe is beautiful, and a standard to strive for.

The conclusion here is that, contrary to what a lot people think, changing your body is not what is going to improve your body image. Shifting your perception and your beliefs and standards is.

2) Social media, family and improving body image

There’s no surprise here when I tell you that society plays a massive role in shaping our body image. Same thing goes with our families. I was born in 1994, and I grew up with a mom and a grandmother who are from a generation for whom weight was the biggest failure you can have, and maintaining a low weight is somehow considered an achievement. My generation, and probably yours, inherited those stories and restrictive eating habits from the previous generations.

I’ve grown up being told that being thin is what I should strive for. That being over a certain weight is bad. That being bigger than my friends is an issue, because women should be thin and men don’t like bigger women. That generational transmission is something that I work with my 1:1 coaching clients in my Body Freedom programme - a lot of your body image issues are probably things that were never yours in the first place. Chances are that you’ve inherited from other women in your family, because they never worked to fix them, and unknowingly transmitted it through generations.

Social media has also a massive influence. We’re bombarded with messages and images that always show the same types of body, and very often bodies that fit an unrealistic standard of beauty. I’m not going to go into the rant about what we see on social media not being real, because of filters and photoshop, and posing are used to make bodies look a certain way. But just be aware of that, when you’re admiring someone’s body on social media, you don’t know how many photos the person took to get the perfect angle that made their body look better.

On social media, there’s very little diversity of bodies unless you look for it. You tend to get recommendations for accounts similar to what you follow. So if you follow influencers with bodies that fit into beauty standards, who promote content on how to stay “fit”, this is what you're going to be seeing. And you might feel that you’re the odd one out and that you should look like them.

So my advice to you is to try to find people who have a similar body as yours to follow on Instagram. Curate your feed to have a diversity of bodies, to be reminded that in the real world, bodies are all different, and all beautiful. Social media doesn’t have to make you feel like shit about what you look like; if it does, it might be because you're following the wrong people. I’ve seen occasions where a client follows those people for motivation, in the hope that if they look at those bodies enough, they will be motivated to make the changes that will get them to look like that too. But in reality, it ends up making them feel terrible about themselves.

3) Mind-Body connection

The field I did my coaching certification in is Eating Psychology and the mind-body connection. And let me tell you, it's incredibly interesting. I won’t get into too much detail here, but what I wanted to mention in this post is that your mind and your body are intricately connected. Your thoughts are affecting your mental and emotional well-being. Negative thoughts about your body may lead you to adopt behaviours that will make you believe & prove that these negative thoughts are correct. On the other hand, a healthy, accepting, loving mindset can improve your body image. Focusing on your mental and emotional health can help you change the way you feel and see your body.

That’s something I work on with my clients during coaching session: we look at examining and challenging the negative beliefs you have about your body and about yourself in general. Our goal is to make you learn to see how valuable and amazing your body is, no matter your size or shape. It’s learning that your body can do so much for you, and that you might have been under appreciating it for so long. That sometimes you feel like there’s nothing about your looks that is good, because you forget to practice finding things that you actually like, and only focus on the things you’re not happy with. We often think that “bullying” ourselves into change will motivate us to change. But in reality, being accepting and having self-compassion is way more effective, as it makes us more likely to have the confidence to start new healthier behaviours. And therefore maintaining a positive body image.

4) Body neutrality before body positivity

Last but not least, I wanted to mention that for some of us, it’s hard to go from hating our body and having a terrible body image, to loving it and feeling beautiful. Sometimes it's even hard to ever imagine that we’re going to get there someday. Body neutrality is a great place to start aiming for, as it focuses on what your body can do and how valuable it is rather than focusing on how it looks. If you start learning to love your body for all the great things it does for you, you will start to accept it more and see it in a new light. You don’t have to start loving how it looks immediately, but learning to appreciate it and respect it is a must.

And if all of this feels like a stretch right now and you don’t know where to start, in my Body Freedom 1:1 coaching programme, we work on all those topics to get you to a place where you feel confident and in peace with your body. Book your consult here.