Confessions of a Closet Introvert

Body Image

Hi guys. Its been a while. I hope your summer has been going well so far.

Mine has been eaten up by hours and hours of band practice, but I managed to escape for one week to go on vacation to New Orleans. It was really fun down there, with all the jazz music and the food and the riverboats and the food and the French Quarter and the FOOD.

The food down there was SO BLEEPING GOOD I CAN'T EVEN RIGHT NOW I MISS IT.

We ate gumbo and pralines and beignets, and over the course of my one week down south, I gained five pounds.

FIVE WHOLE POUNDS?! I thought to myself.
How could this happen? I walked at least a mile every day while I down there, how could I possibly have put on so much weight in so little time.

I freaked out a little bit, asking myself all these questions, but the question I should have been asking myself was ...Why do I care about five extra pounds on my body?

I came to a realization this summer, something I learned about myself that puts me in a position that I sadly share with so many other men and women: I have body dysmorphia.

Body dysmorphia is when you see your own body in a distorted sense, where your body image in your head is a funhouse mirror version of the real thing. Thankfully, I don't have severe dysmorphia, the kind psychologists would classify as an actual disorder. What I have, like millions of other people, is a warped image of my body based on how the media tells me my body should look like.

I hear, for example, that to be sexy you have to have a flat tummy, so I look at the fat on my stomach and enlarge it in my mind, until it becomes some giant, flabby monstrosity on my body that i need to hide at all costs with loose fitting clothing. I never wear anything tight around my stomach because I don't want anyone to see my round tummy through the clothes

The weird part is that when I see other people with rounder stomachs, I think nothing of it. Some of the most attractive girls I know have at least a little bit of a tummy fat, and I think that it looks fine. I just can't accept it on myself, for some reason. And I just couldn't get rid of the fat, despite exercise and a proper diet. I was at a point where I was completely healthy, but I thought there was still something wrong with me because I was not losing weight when I thought I should have been.

So, when I let myself go for a week and ate all the wonderfully delicious food I could find in New Orleans, I of course gained weight. Even though I exercised every day there, I expected that was going to gain at least some weight over the week. Yet knowing what was going to happen to my weight did not stop me from being upset when I stepped on the scale. What was I doing wrong? I kept asking myself. Why do I continue to hate my body?

I found the answer. The problem was not my body. The problem was in my head.

Through all my years of being conditioned by magazines and movies and television on what pretty was supposed to look like, I had taken the parts of me that didn't fit their definition of "pretty" and begun looking at them like they were ugly. The parts I didn't like on my body became more that just parts of me, they had morphed in my head into monstrous disfigurements, things that no one ever would find attractive about me. I had been in a downward spiral of hate and shame for years because the dysmorphia caused me to see myself as a dorky, mushy teenager with bad skin and no hope of being "pretty".

When I realized all of this, what I had been putting myself through, I had a great moment of enlightenment in the fact that I was not alone. It is a great feeling to know that you have not gone crazy, but have people all around you to relate to what you have to say. After all, that's why I made this book, to help anyone else in similar situations feel like they are not alone. There are SO many other people in the world going through what I'm going through now, and knowing that is helping me get better.

I'm now committed to keeping myself focused on the parts of body that I like, like the fact that I've built up so much strength and muscle in my body from training and that I am completely healthy with a fully functioning body. After all, our bodies are meant to function properly for our survival, not to look pretty on a magazine cover. This can be said for everyone, skinny or fat, man or woman: the perfect body is the one that allows you to be healthy and able to live a happy life. Be thankful if you have a fully functioning body, because there are so many beautiful people who do not get to experience all the joys in life because their body prevents them from doing so, whether they are stuck in a wheelchair or a hospital bed or have to simply avoid certain activities because they have a sprained ankle or broken limb.

Everyone, my advice to you is to stop focusing on the negatives of yourself and begin enjoying what you do have. You'll end up much happier in the long run when you can truly say that you are able to love yourself and not waste all of your time worrying about how you look. This is a big change I have to make in my way of thinking, but it will be totally worth it to say and whole-heartedly mean "I love my body because it is healthy and beautiful." I hope all of you will be able to do the same.

Sincerely yours,

Tara