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If you're tired of feeling never enough, of constantly being derailed by your own fears or the reactions of others, then you are in the right place. I'm Deb, a licensed psychologist, and this is Blooming Outside the Lines, a podcast dedicated to women who've spent their lives trying to stay within the lines of what's acceptable, who've never felt good enough and who are ready to break free and bloom. Let's talk about how you can build a solid foundation connected with your strength and your wisdom. Before we start, I need to make sure that you know that the information I share with you is just that. It's just information. It's not meant to be a prescription for what you should do or meant to replace the advice of any of your healthcare providers. It also doesn't mean that we have a professional client-therapist relationship.

Hi there and welcome. In this episode, I want to focus on something that as women usually brings us endless moments of pain, and that is our body image. There are so many aspects to body image, our expectations about what constitutes a good body and where those expectations come from, for instance, the influence of the diet industry or social or racial hierarchies.

And in this episode, I want to focus on what body image actually is. It seems obvious that body image is about the body, right? And it is about the body and not in the way most of us believe. This may or may not be true for you and what was true for me and has been true for the women I've met with in my work is the belief that body image is an accurate reflection of what we see when we look in the mirror? Well, one would think so. it turns out, what turns out to be more true is that body image reflects our beliefs more than what is actually in the mirror. 

This is usually a hard one for most of us to believe as we are sure that we are seeing things as they are, that our eyes wouldn't deceive us, that we can see the truth in the mirror. I had a quote up on my bulletin board for a long time when I saw clients in my office, and it said something along the lines of, a mirror is not an objective witness. And I think that really captures the theme for today's episode, we don't look in the mirror with objectivity. We look in the mirror through the lens of our own thoughts and fears. 

Think back on your adolescence and think about whether there was some part of your body that you were obsessed with when you looked in the mirror. And that's what you looked for and you saw. For me, two things come to mind.

One that I discovered through the examination of my face that comes with being a teenager, and that was that one of my eyelids drooped. When I looked in the mirror, that was all I could see. It came to define me, and I felt ugly and abnormal because of it. I never saw my smile or the rich, deep color of my eyes. All I saw was that droopy eye.

I think most teenagers have something they fixate on. And then there was my body. I remember the exact moment when focusing on my body became an issue. My aunt was visiting with my mom. I was probably around 12 or 13. They were cooking and I was sitting with my sibs at the table listening to their conversation.

My ears perked up when the discussion turned to me, and my aunt said to my mother, she sure is going to have saddlebags, isn't she? Saddlebags, I wondered. I didn't even know what they meant. And the way they were talking about it, I knew it was something I didn't want to have, and I started to feel afraid. Then they started pointing out how neither of them had them as they ran their hands down the outside of their hips, and while they wondered who I had inherited them from, clearly not from either of them, as they spoke, My fear started to be accompanied by shame. It was the first time I really thought about the shape of my body, and it wouldn't be the last. 

It didn't help that my saddlebag shape made buying pants extremely difficult. If they fit in the waist, they didn't fit my hips. I cringe when I think back at those cheerful, angry moments shopping with my mom when I was filled with frustration at my body. 

I know it wasn't her fault that the pants didn't fit right, and I wouldn't have wanted to be around myself as I tried on one pair after another of pants, cheerful and not happy with any of them, because even if they did fit, what did I see? I saw those saddlebags. 

I'm wondering if you have a moment like that where the size or shape of your body became a source of concern, a source of feeling not good enough of being outside the lines of what was expected for a good or acceptable body. And if when you look in the mirror, if it's the first thing that you see.

Body image has much more to do with our fears and beliefs than it has to do with what's reflected in the mirror. Most of the women I've shared this with have had a hard time believing it. I think that as I mentioned at the start of this episode, we all believe that we're seeing the world exactly as it is. 

And in actuality, we're all seeing the world differently because of the way our brains and our eyes work together. We don't actually see with our eyes. And our eyes are not the little cameras that we imagine them to be.

Our eyes can't operate independently of our brain, and what we see is actually determined by other parts of the brain. The actual images that we see are formed in the visual cortex, and most of the nerve fibers that come into the visual cortex don't come from the eyes, they come from other parts of our brain. 

So vision is formed in the brain rather than being a photo taken by the eyes. And there's no way the brain can process all the data that's coming into it in one moment in time. And we're still learning how the brain manages this.

What seems to be true is that we can only register what is often described as three or four chunks of information at a time.

That's not very much when you think about all that's going on in a single moment, all that we're seeing, hearing, feeling, touching. And so the brain has to have some way of deciding what is important to notice.

Survival and efficiency or conservation of energy are most important to the brain, the brain prefers to use what it already has. And it also tries to predict what will happen in the current moment based on what will happen in the past in order to keep us safe and make things easier for us. 

Because of this, our brain will preferentially notice things that match worries or fears that we have had in the past. This is survival based. If we hadn't noticed things that could have killed us, we wouldn't have survived as a species. Information comes in through our eyes and is processed in the brain based on past experiences, beliefs and survival instincts.

An example of this is being outside, enjoying the day, maybe you're on a walk or at a picnic and you're enjoying the beauty or time with your friends and then clouds start to build up in the sky and they're getting darker and darker. What happens? 

For most of us, the darkened sky begins to dominate what we see. All the beauty is still there. Our friends are still there. And those dark clouds start to be what we notice. We are preferentially noticing the dark clouds because storms can be dangerous. We see what we are afraid of and what is important to us.

So think about this when you think about body image. If we are afraid, if we have fears about our body, what are we going to preferentially notice? It also seems that once we believe something to be true, that that belief impacts what we see in the future. There have been many studies looking at this.

For instance, in a study looking at individuals who were prone to paranoia, the participants were more likely to falsely believe that one dot was chasing another in a visual task. 

The work by Yon and colleagues seems particularly relevant to body image. They scanned the brains of participants and discovered that beliefs of the volunteers changed patterns of activity in the visual cortex, again, the area of the brain important in determining what we see, and that these expectations continue to shape brain activity when those expectations of what would happen were no longer true.

They described this as stubbornness in the brain. So when we think about this from a body image perspective, what that might mean is that if we form a perception or a decision about our brain, a belief about it, that we're likely to continue to see that even if our body changes.

Think about if you've known someone who was highly critical of their body, maybe kept believing that they were too heavy when you looked at them and you couldn't really see it. And for them, that belief that their body was too big felt very real. That's an example of this. 

And our emotions also impact our body image. This was a study that specifically looked at body image and what we see in the mirror. And I apologize, I don't seem to have this book anymore. And I did an AI search and it didn't bring it up. And I think that's probably indicating my age and how old this study was. 

And I remember this study because it shows how our emotional state and our beliefs impact what we see. This is what I remember from the study. Women tried on swimsuits and then did a body image questionnaire. They were then asked to solve some very difficult, maybe they were even insolvable problems. I can't remember that part. Anyway, they were very difficult math questions, likely to impact women's mood or beliefs about themselves.

And then the women were asked again to try on swimsuits and filled out the same body image questionnaire. This is so fascinating because results showed that women rated their bodies significantly more negatively after attempting to solve the math problems. This was the same day. Their bodies obviously hadn't changed. 

What changed was what was going on in their brain. Whatever wires or beliefs or emotions were triggered by being unable to solve the math problems were impacting what they saw in the mirror when they were in the swimsuits.

So what does all of this mean for what we see in the mirror and think of as our body image? It means that what we see will be determined by our beliefs, our fears, and our emotional state. 

What it also means is that we don't need to change our body to change our body image, which is a good thing because long-term changes in our body shape and size are difficult. I'm not sure what the impact of the new weight loss drugs will mean for that. My fear is that they will lead to more focus and concern about weight. 

And because what we see is determined by our fears and beliefs, rather than what's actually in the mirror, women will continue to worry about whether the weight they've lost is good enough and whether they'll maintain the loss. This is an important aspect of body image. Just like other things that we notice, the brain tends to match input, things that are coming in with things that have scared us or felt dangerous to us in the past in order to help us be prepared.

So this is helpful when it comes to thunderstorms. It's really helpful that we preferentially notice those dark clouds and do what we need to do to stay safe. And it can work against us in what we see in the mirror or believe to be true about our bodies. 

I shared with you in an earlier episode how I came out of my growing up years of being an introvert in a family of extroverts with a fear that something was wrong with me. Thinking back on this, no wonder my aunt's comment had such an impact on me. My brain likely matched that comment with those fears about who I was and whether I was okay. 

And those saddlebags became much more than a shape that made clothes shopping difficult, they became additional evidence of not being good enough, and they triggered both fear and shame because of those already existing worries. 

There's always so much more I could say about each of these topics, and I'm going to stop here, and I hope that what I have shared with you has given you some ideas to ponder about how you see your body and what beliefs there might be that you might need to work on that are getting triggered at the site of your body or possibly keeping you continually tipped into a stress response.

As long as we are afraid of not measuring up when it comes to our bodies, that is what we're going to see. As women, our bodies have long been a measure of our value and being appealing is most likely strongly wired in our subconscious with being safe, with safety. 

So it's understandable that we would have these fears, these desires to measure up, to have the body that will be chosen. Our value is often wired with idealized images of the female body and most often within us, images that for most of us are unreasonable.

So the question I want to leave you with is, that how you want to continue measuring your value and seeing your body? Or is it time to start creating new wiring about who you are in the world? One of the things that I've asked women to do is to think about what they want written in their obituary.

Was it that they stayed a size six throughout their lives?

I doubt it.

And I think I'll stop on that note and give you time to think about it.

Take good care until I talk with you again and bye-bye.

This has been Blooming Outside the Lines, a podcast dedicated to supporting you in blooming into all you are meant and wish to be. If you enjoyed it and gained value, please consider leaving a review, as it will help other women to find it and please share it with anyone who would benefit from it. And if you would like to be notified when new episodes become available, be sure and follow on your favorite podcast app. Until next time, how will you light a candle of self-acceptance? Because you deserve to be you, even if others disagree.