Dissatisfied with Body Image

When someone says they are struggling with their body image, what do they really mean?

They might dislike their weight, feel self-conscious about their stomach, worry about ageing or have a broader sense that something is wrong with their body as a whole.

All of these experiences can be called body image. Yet they’re clearly not the same thing. Part of the problem is that body image is a term trying to do a lot of work.

What is body image?

There’s plurality on both sides of the term—and then even more once we consider who is having the experience, where, and when.

Let’s start with the body. It’s a whole made up of different parts. We can focus on how it looks, what it can do, the body as a whole, or particular areas of it. Each of these bodily aspects can then become the focus of different kinds of relationships: dissatisfaction, appreciation, concern, pride, shame, avoidance, investment, and so on.

Then there’s image. Within body image research, image has come to mean more than just the picture of our body we hold in our heads. ¹ It also includes how we think and feel about the body, and how we behave in relation to it.

Bring those two sides together and the possibilities multiply: different ways of relating to the body can be directed towards different aspects of it, creating a wide range of relationships that can sit under the broad umbrella of body image.

For example, a person can simultaneously perceive that their stomach is too big, think positively about their strength, see a scar as an important part of their history, feel worried about changes they notice with age, or avoid situations where their body will be judged.

That’s a lot for one term to hold together. And the term has even more work to do, because body image experiences can vary again depending on who is having them, where they occur, and when.

Person, place and period

Body image experiences are shaped by who is having them. Age, gender, ethnicity, social class, sexuality, disability, cultural background, and other dimensions of social life can influence how people understand bodies—their own and those of others—and what they believe a body should be.

Individual characteristics such as personality, self-esteem, and perfectionism can further shape these understandings and how someone experiences their own body. Momentary states such as mood, stress, and tiredness can also have a part to play.

Place matters too. The same body can be experienced differently at home, at work, at the gym, at the beach, within relationships, sporting communities, or different media environments. Different settings bring different norms and expectations about bodies, which can shape what the body means and how someone experiences their own body in a particular moment.

Then there is time. The body itself is continually changing: ageing, gaining or losing weight, becoming stronger, becoming injured and recovering, being tattooed, undergoing surgery, or changing in countless other ways. So body image experiences happen in relation to a body that is itself materially changing.

But body image experiences don’t necessarily change at the same pace as the body. Previous beliefs and experiences can continue shaping how the present body is understood long after the body or circumstances have changed. Bodies have histories, and so do our relationships with them.

So what are we actually talking about?

Put all of this together and it becomes clear just how much complexity and contingency sit underneath the term body image.

That doesn’t mean people’s body image experiences are endlessly fragmented or constantly changing. Particular concerns, values, and ways of relating to the body can remain consistent, dominate certain periods of life, or persist across different situations.

The point is simply that there are many possible relationships within what we call body image. Research cannot study all those relationships at once. It has to narrow its attention to particular ones, and doing so has produced rich and useful insights.

The problem of asking one term to do so much can crystallise, however, when findings about one specific relationship—dissatisfaction with body fat, for example—are discussed more broadly as though they describe body image as a whole.

Framing findings in that way can obscure what has actually been studied. The term body image doesn’t always help here either: it can hide how varied body image experiences can actually be, while image can make it easy to think first about appearance, even though the concept covers much more than that.

Such findings may tell us something specific and important, but they don’t, by themselves, tell us how someone relates to their body more broadly.

All of this raises a new question: how do we keep that specificity without losing sight of the broader whole?

Embodiment and body image

One way to hold breadth and specificity together is to bring embodiment into the mix.

We all live embodied lives. We move, sense, act, experience pleasure and pain, interact with other people, and participate in the world through our bodies. Body image is more specific: it concerns how we personally experience and relate to that embodiment—how we perceive, think, feel, and behave in relation to our own bodies.

This way of thinking is useful because embodiment keeps the broader bodily life in view, while body image draws our attention to particular ways our own bodies become significant to us.

Not everything embodied is necessarily body image. Movement, pain, fatigue, sensation, and action can all be part of embodied life without necessarily entering the territory of body image. They become relevant to body image when they shape how we perceive, think, feel, or behave in relation to our own bodies.

For me, thinking about body image this way takes some of the pressure off the term. If I narrow my attention to a particular body image experience—say, dissatisfaction with body fat—embodiment reminds me that it’s one particular relationship within a much broader bodily life.

My dissatisfaction with the term body image, then, isn’t that the concept is wrong, but that the label can conceal more complexity than it reveals.

That doesn’t make the term useless. It simply means we need to use it carefully: being clear about which particular body image experience we mean when we use the term, while remembering that it forms part of a much broader experience of living in and through the body.

The idea of body image as a mental “picture” goes back to Paul Schilder’s The Image and Appearance of the Human Body (1935). Although often remembered for this wording, Schilder’s account was broader: the image wasn’t static, but continuously shaped by physiological, psychological and social experience.

As body image research grew, the concept stretched further to include how people think, feel and behave in relation to their bodies, and increasingly to consider not only what bodies look like, but what they can do. In that sense, the concept became increasingly multidimensional while the term body image stayed the same.

For me, body image isn’t the perfect name for everything the concept tries to cover, but the term is so established that it’s unlikely to disappear anytime soon. At this point, the simplest way I have of defining it while still capturing what the concept covers is:

Body image is how we perceive, think and feel about our body, and how we respond to it. That can be about how the body looks, what it can do, the body as a whole or particular parts of it. So although the term body image can sound like one appearance-based thing, it’s really a broad term for the different ways we relate to our bodies. ↩︎

This article does not constitute personalised advice or professional consultation. For personalised assistance, please consult with a relevant professional. The opinions expressed are solely my own and do not necessarily reflect any organisation’s or individual’s views.