Celebrating Our Natural Sizes, Part III

To all your friends, you’re delirious
So consumed in all your doom
Trying hard to fill the emptiness
The piece is gone left the puzzle undone
That’s the way it is

You are beautiful no matter what they say
Words can’t bring you down
You are beautiful in every single way
Yes, words can’t bring you down
Don’t you bring me down today…

- Beautiful by Christina Aguilera (YouTube)

(Click here for part I)
(Click here for part II)

This week isn’t particularly significant in the world of eating disorders, but we wanted to tackle another tough one this week: Self-image and Body image… by which we mean “how do you see yourself?”

Are you confident about yourself?
Do you think you’re good at what you do?
Do you like the way you look?
Do you think you’re a valuable person?

Whether you answered yes or no to those questions might give you some sense of how positive or negative your self-image is, and how you feel about your body usually goes hand-in-hand with how you feel about yourself as a person. As a teenager, it’s actually pretty natural for those things to go together… it’s a time in your life when you really start to care about how people see you.

.

That brings up an important point, though: How important are your looks? Look back on two of those questions from before: Are you confident about yourself? Do you think you’re a valuable person?… On a scale of 1 to 10, how important are your looks to answering each of those questions?

The answers to that will probably start to give you an idea of how much of your self-image is tied into your body image. The rest of your self-image will probably come from how you feel about the things you do: What kinds of talents, abilties or skills do you have? What are the best qualities about your personality?

.

To be fair, your body image is probably hard to change. Heck, even just your body is often hard to change. But what other kinds of things make you happy? What other things do you do that make you proud of yourself?

If you don’t have anything like that makes you happy or that you’re proud of for now, would you like to? I can imagine it might feel scary to try something new… Maybe it’s discouraging to think about it because you already feel like you’ll fail at it. Maybe then you can start small.

But if you feel that way, you could probably use a little something positive in your life, a little pickup… it might be worth a try.

.

Related stuff:

• The Real Me Experience is an interactive web site for young women. It’s composed of surveys and exercises to help you reflect on yourself, your self-esteem and body image. It’s 100% private, and your account (free, no e-mail required) stays open for 30 days, then is deleted. It takes around 2 hours to do, but you can do it little by little as long as you have your account.
• Back at New Year’s, we wrote a post about resolutions and goal setting that might help you try something new.
• Looking Glass Foundation for Eating Disorders here in Vancouver just started a series of on-line support groups: Mondays for Family & Friends, Wednesdays for Adults and Thursdays for Adolescents, weekly at 7:30pm pacific time. Click here to learn more about it and/or register.
• NEDIC (the National Eating Disorders Information Centre) has a fabulous section with articles on self-esteem and body image; They’re academic in nature, if that’s your thing.