Estimated read time: 3-4 minutes
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You see them everywhere, heavily airbrushed images of men and women. No matter what they're selling, every frame is sending a destructive underlying message. Every image imbedded into our minds, setting unreasonable standards for ourselves. Translating into what our eyes see in our reflection every day, nagging us to be "perfect."
Michelle Lewis, owner of Salt Lake Weight Counseling, says she faces this concern every day with her clients.
"Perfect isn't attainable," she said. "It's just not realistic, and the more we try to control something that isn't controllable the crazier we feel."
Lewis says girls as young as 4 years old are already forming an inner dialogue about their bodies, and 80 percent of females 10 years and older feel negatively about themselves.
"How we feel about ourselves, our bodies translates to how we feel about ourselves emotionally," Lewis says.
This toxic inner dialogue is doing more than just harming our self-esteem: "All those messages of not good enough equate to not going after the jobs they want, not going after the relationships they want," she said.
This distorted perception can easily trigger an array of unhealthy habits.
"Starving yourself until you're 80 pounds because you just want to disappear, or binging yourself to 300 or 400 pounds because you want to be invisible in a different way, or you want to numb yourself or punish yourself to the point where the emotional pain goes away," she said.
So how do we reverse this negative downward spiral?
"The best way to interrupt the shame cycle is by challenging those negative thoughts," Lewis said. "Body acceptance is hard for a lot of women who struggle with their weight because they feel like if they accept their body as it is, it means they are giving up any hope that their body will change. I'm not asking you to love your body. I'm asking you to accept that it is the way it is right now in this moment because it can't be anything different than what it is in this moment.
"Hating it will never get you where you want to go. Loving your body will get you so much further than hating it ever has because you start to treat it with compassion, and you nurture it instead of shaming and degrading it."
Lewis said these thoughts and images that surround us every day, telling us that we're not good enough "sometimes we might be the only voice that tells us we are. So that voice has to outpower everything else. Change occurs from the inside out. Once we start to feel good about ourselves we will treat ourselves with the respect that they deserve."
Lewis said if you wake up thinking negative thoughts about yourself or find yourself obsessing about food, it wouldn't hurt to seek help. Jenniffer is a special projects producer who heads up the Your Life Your Health, Zero Fatalities and High 5 initiatives. For questions, feedback or possible story ideas, please email jmichaelson@ksl.com.
