I hate my body

What this looks like

You catch your reflection and you wince. You avoid mirrors. You avoid photos. You wear specific clothes to hide specific parts. You’ve been waiting to lose weight to start being okay with yourself. You’ve lost weight before and you weren’t okay then either. The hating has been there at every weight you’ve been.

The hating isn’t responding to the body. The hating is doing its own thing.

What you’ve already tried

• Body positivity content
• Affirmations in front of the mirror
• Therapy that explored where it started
• A new diet that you thought would finally fix it
• Avoiding situations where you’d have to see yourself
• Telling yourself other people don’t notice
• Pretending you’ve moved past it

The hating is back tomorrow.

What kind of eater are you?

Why this isn’t really about the body

You very likely came up with a household, a culture, or a school environment where bodies were policed and you learned to be the one doing the policing of yours. You may have grown up with a parent who hated their own body and you absorbed the framework. You may have been the kid whose body was commented on by adults or peers, and you internalized that your body was something to apologize for. You may have lived through a stretch when your body changed in a way that felt wrong to you, and the hating started then and never updated.

The body you’re hating is not the body you have. It’s the body you have through the lens of years of training to find it unacceptable. Losing weight doesn’t change the lens. Body positivity doesn’t change the lens either, because body positivity is asking you to feel positive on top of a system that’s been generating the negative.

For the related patterns, see I yo-yo diet or I have body dysmorphia . For the broader framework, see I have an eating problem .

The lens is the system. The lens can change.

How we work with it

Strategic therapy aims at the lens. The body isn’t where the work happens. We work on what you do with your body that keeps the lens calibrated for finding fault (the avoiding-photos, the specific-clothing rules, the comparison habits, the body-checking) and on the daily inventory you’ve been running without realizing it counts as something. The hating quiets because the practice that has been training it stops being practiced.

You catch your reflection and keep walking. Your body stops being the thing you have an opinion about every hour.