Are you high-functioning professionally but dysfunctional about your body?
I feel like I wasted a ton of energy in my 20s and early 30s trying to fix my body image and modify my body shape – energy I could have spent on much much bigger things. Now, I’m an eating psychology coach and I sometimes talk to women whose confidence in public and at work is severely impacted by how they view their own body, or the sense of low-level failure they have built up around their inability to be in-control around food and do what they intellectually think would solve their weight/body challenges. One woman feels that she isn’t taken seriously in the boardroom because she is a little overweight. Another is a burlesque dancer by night, but wrestling with binge eating and body hate privately, so although she can perform without hesitation, she’s very timid around selling and promoting herself. I’m collecting these stories – I myself had a background in performance and know the disjuncture that you can create between a public success story and a private struggle. I’m curious to know if any of you feel that your confidence and energy to play big is depleted by your relationship with food and body image?
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Yes! You have described me perfectly. My earliest memories of body image were of me as a kid whose nickname was “Skinny Blink”. As I got older, my mother would always criticize my body, telling me that no matter what I did, I was destined to be fat. I do love food, but sometimes I feel like it has control over me instead of vice versa. And unlike with things like alcohol, you can’t just go “cold turkey” and cut out food from your life completely. Mindful eating certainly helps, but when I’m pressed for time and haven’t pre-made healthy meals, I tend to fall back into unhealthy patterns with food.
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