Body Image Issues and Healthy Boundaries
Many people, but primarily young, educated, Western women, struggle to sustain a positive body image—for a multitude of reasons that have been discussed in previous posts. Often a negative body image leads to a poor relationship with the body and other aspects of self. It is associated with impoverished self-care and unhealthy eating and lifestyle habits.
Having a negative body image is related to general low self-esteem and depression or anxiety. Women with poor body image often struggle with boundaries in relationship to self and others. In this post, I will attempt to shed some light on... Read More
According to a new study led by Michael B. McFarland of the Department of Psychology at the University of North Texas, men primarily gauge their body satisfaction on three specific body parts, and they are not what one might think they are. Men who have 
Some would say the winter solstice is a moment of equality, in which there is equal light and equal dark. It is also a moment of reversal. The seasonal significance of the winter solstice is in the reversal of the gradual lengthening of nights and shortening of days. I like metaphors, so to me, winter solstice is about embracing opposites, or seeming opposites like light and dark. Like the yin yang symbol, they are parts that go together, equal parts of a whole. Like phases of the moon, there is a shifting from light to dark and back again. At the moment we embrace opposites, or shifting between... 
Perfectionism is multi-dimensional, including evaluative concerns (EV) and personal standards (PS) of perfectionism. “Whereas PS perfectionism is primarily defined by the setting of high standards per se, EC perfectionism is primarily defined by 
Thanksgiving is a holiday for cultivating gratitude for all the good in our lives. It’s also an opportunity to participate in a ritual of breaking bread with loved ones, a celebration of our connection to others, sharing the plentiful food that we are fortunate enough to have.
Yet as Thanksgiving approached, several of my clients who see me for help with their eating-related problems expressed apprehension about the upcoming holiday. Their worries focused mainly on the plethora of food they anticipated would be at the meal, and some described family gatherings at which food was around at all... 
There are styles of thinking that are commonly related to anxiety and unhappiness. One patterned way of thinking that is identified by therapists who work with cognitions is the all-or-nothing style. It is very often a part of the negative body-image experience. This way of thinking can lead to a lot of unnecessary distress but is also a symptom of feeling overwhelmed. When the mind is faced with too much to deal with, a tactic it uses to conserve energy is to reduce its interpretation of experiences to simple categories: black or white, all or nothing, all bad or all good. In this effort to simplify... 
Funnel chest is a term used to describe the medical condition known as Pectus excavatum (PE), a deformity of the chest wall that occurs in one of every thousand children. “It is well known that children with PE are affected by their 
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Women struggle with eating issues at various ages, and research suggests that over the course of their lifetimes, women maintain relatively constant levels of body dissatisfaction. More recent findings reveal that middle-aged women are among the fastest growing segment of the population with eating problems and body image issues today. “Findings consistently indicate that midlife women desire to be thinner, diet despite being a healthy weight and engage more frequently in avoidant behavior associated with 
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Intervention programs for eating and food issues have been designed to target the root of sociocultural attitudes toward personal appearance, namely internalization of the thin-ideal (media). Different methods have been used to measure the effectiveness of programs aimed at targeting media internalization, however the Sociocultural Attitudes Towards Appearance Questionnaire (SATAQ3) is quite often used with adolescents.
“Media internalization has been found to be directly predictive of eating pathology and to operate indirectly through increasing other risk factors in the dual-pathway... 
One of the most prevalent and harmful misconceptions about eating disorders is that they are all about vanity. Many people believe that sufferers are vain, beauty-obsessed brats that could easily recover if they'd simply stop looking in the mirror and get over their need to be pretty. This isn't even close to the truth. As someone who has been personally offended by this belief, I wanted to share my story and my thoughts to hopefully shed some light on the vanity myth.
Before anorexia took hold of my life, I believe I had a pretty unusual level of self-esteem when it came to my body and looks.... 
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Most women conform to feminine norms, while men conform to masculine norms. But female college athletes strive to achieve both. “Past research has focused on how conformity to societal gender norms constrains and influences men’s behavior,” said Jesse A. Steinfeldt, of Indiana University-Bloomington, and lead author of a study that investigated how this dual role influenced women’s body image. “A higher emphasis placed on conforming to masculine norms has been linked to more health risk behaviors and fewer health promotion behaviors; binge drinking; and greater endorsement of rape... 
What did you first think of when you saw that an article titled “Bodies and Identity” was posted on a mental health care blog? Likely, words such as “anorexia,” “bulimia,” and “compulsive eating”, ran through your head. An article about bodies and body-image is often assumed to be about negative body-image. We’re so used to talking about bodies as problems that need to be overcome, addressed, or “worked on”, that a direct relationship between bodies and negative body-image is almost a reflex. But what does “body image” really mean? In what way does how we see our bodies... 
How do you know what you are and what you are not, and why? Where did you gain this knowledge and experience that influences your current behaviour and choices? In the process of the development of your Self, did you consciously stop to think about if you wanted to be shaped in a particular manner while it was happening? Certainly there were moments where you may have wanted to stop an experience or avoid pain, but in retrospect can you say that it didn’t shape who you are today that in some way that has value to you? Do you want to, and can you re-author your Self and hence shape your experiences? Some... 
