More Than A Body: Your Body Is an Instrument, Not an Ornament

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I totally agree that clothes can be hard to find in certain shapes and sizes. I am one of those sizes, but when I look around, most people are hard to fit no matter what their size. But the history of clothing sizes and why they are what they are is another story that the authors didn't study that much.

Our research points to one particularly awesome way to experience real empowerment, decrease self-consciousness, and embrace your body as your own – not as a decoration for everyone else to gawk at. Medical professionals sometimes show me concern, but there is no follow-up care or support. I cannot access any mental health services other than the one-off chats in the emergency department. It sometimes feels like they don’t want to “reward” me by showing me attention. I have been told by a psychiatrist that they cannot make it too comfortable for me to go to the emergency department or they are “enabling” me. I am made to feel that I am responsible for bad behaviour and not worth treating.

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An indispensable resource for women of all ages, this is a guide to help us better connect to ourselves, to value ourselves, to love ourselves, and ultimately, to be ourselves." More Than a Body is a welcome salve for those who are weary of the internal war with their body. Through their groundbreaking body image resilience model, Lexie and Lindsay offer many practical ways to make peace with your body, showing how body image disruptions can be a pathway for healing, rather than provoke a descent into a shame spiral. Ultimately, readers will find real solutions to reunite with their whole, embodied selves.”

A couple years ago, I was talked into running two different half marathons and I was terrified – not only is running really hard physically and mentally, but I was possibly more terrified of being looked at while running. I spent the first few weeks on a treadmill at my gym, so self-conscious that my face got really red and that people might be looking at me. I felt self-conscious that I wasn’t wearing the right outfits for running. (Is spandex a necessity?!?!) I felt self-conscious that the runners next to me were going faster and farther. But as I trained and built up my endurance, something inside me changed. Instead of picturing myself running, I started just running. I stopped worrying about being a good vision of me and I gave myself all of me instead. Running now makes me feel really happy because I can set a goal and get there, and working toward that goal allows me to release all those happy endorphins, feel more energy and motivation, and see what my body is capable of. If your partner objectifies you by feeling entitled to your body looking a certain way or degrading your appearance or asking you to change, please know that you can’t escape that harmful dynamic by changing your body. You can’t outrun it. Any increase in warmth, affection, care and concern you earn through “fixing” your body is guaranteed to be temporary and always at risk of being withdrawn. That is a temporary and tenuous solution to a problem that will not go away. You won’t always be able to live up to those expectations, for a huge variety of reasons you can and can’t control. In a committed partnership, love has to be bigger and deeper than that. Encourage them to be vulnerable. Ask them to open up about their own insecurities, whether they are body-related or not. Ask them how you can support them and build up their confidence. This will build trust and intimacy, which will strengthen your relationship. Encourage them to seek therapy to dig deep into how and when they learned to objectify people and how they can correct their thinking and heal their relationships and their own body image. Offer to work with them as you both learn healthier ways of seeing and relating to each other and your own bodies. According to models of objectification, viewing someone as a body induces de-mentalization, stripping away their psychological traits. Here evidence is presented for an alternative account, where a body focus does not diminish the attribution of all mental capacities but, instead, leads perceivers to infer a different kind of mind. Drawing on the distinction in mind perception between agency and experience, it is found that focusing on someone's body reduces perceptions of agency (self-control and action) but increases perceptions of experience (emotion and sensation). These effects were found when comparing targets represented by both revealing versus nonrevealing pictures (Experiments 1, 3, and 4) or by simply directing attention toward physical characteristics (Experiment 2). The effect of a body focus on mind perception also influenced moral intuitions, with those represented as a body seen to be less morally responsible (i.e., lesser moral agents) but more sensitive to harm (i.e., greater moral patients; Experiments 5 and 6). These effects suggest that a body focus does not cause objectification per se but, instead, leads to a redistribution of perceived mind.Despite Chelsea Clinton’s front cover assertion that this book is “for women of all ages,” its message is very clearly targeted to women in their teens, 20s and 30s. That’s whose comments and posts are quoted by the authors, and that’s the demographic who, for the most part, are posting selfies on social media and chatting about their journeys to a ‘better bod’.