A Healthy Body Image tip: Unite Your Body with Your Values

Several years ago, I read Your Money or Your Life, a book that changed how I view spending. The authors suggest using money as a natural extension of your values. So, if you value health, you might spend more of your money on organic food. If you value community, you may give more to charity.

You can adopt a similar approach to your relationship with your body. How can you your body be a conduit for your deepest values? Looking at your body (and your body image) from this viewpoint connects the dots between your body, mind, and spirit.

The first step is figuring out what you value. What matters to you? Here are some ideas:  health, beauty, family, creative expression, joy, love, an appreciation of nature and the outdoors, strength, or achievement. Get more ideas from Marshall Rosenberg’s needs list.

The second stop is thinking about how your body can honor those values. If you value nature, do you spend time camping, hiking, or biking? If you value beauty, do you take time to dress beautifully? If you value creativity, do you use your personal style as an outlet for your artistic expression?

These are just a few ideas.

Here’s another benefit of viewing your body from this perspective:  If you’re trying to make changes to your body, such as losing weight or adopting an exercise program, and aren’t having any success, the problem may not be a lack of discipline or know how. The problem may be the wrong focus:  trying to motivate yourself out of vanity (wanting to look good for its own sake), or berating yourself into changing (I’m so fat I’ve had it!)

Try connecting your goals with your values:  you want to lose weight because you value beauty, and you want to wear a wide variety of
clothes on a toned body.  You exercise regularly because you value health, and all of its rewards:  being able to romp in the park with your children, or enjoying an active sexual life with your beloved.

Thinking about this made me understand why being overweight pains me. It’s not so much a body image issue as it is a feeling of betrayal:  the consequence of treating my body in a way that is contrary to my values. I value health; I value compassion; I value love. When I overeat, and consequently gain weight, I’m living contrary to my beliefs. This is painful, and rightly so. If it didn’t feel bad, then it would imply that my values were meaningless. But I do care. Which is why I work at shifting painful habits like bingeing.

Aside from feeling better about your body, this approach can help you become less competitive towards other women. Often, when we judge another woman, we’re judging her behavior according to our values. But what if she’s using her body as an expression of her values? When we let other women have the dignity of their own experience, we find more support for our own.

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