The History of Toxic Body Ideals & Strategies for Body Comparison

Jan. 29

One of the biggest issues I've encountered is the impact of comparison on our body image. It's almost automatic, isn't it? We see someone else and instantly measure ourselves against them. But what I've learned is that this comparison is a thief of joy. It's a silent language we use to describe others, often placing certain body types on a pedestal and, in doing so, diminishing our own worth.

Have you ever stopped to wonder where these beauty standards come from? In one of my most eye-opening discussions, we explore the roots of these ideals. It's a complex web that spans history, touching on Eurocentric beauty standards, racial divides, colonization, and even the transatlantic slave trade. Understanding this historical context is crucial in recognizing how deeply ingrained and pervasive these standards are in our society.

Time stamps

Body Image and Confidence (00:00:50) Discussion on body image, beauty ideals, comparison, and body confidence during the winter season and the impact of social media.
Automatic Thoughts and Comparison (00:02:48) Exploration of unconscious thoughts around comparison and the impact of language on body image.
Broadening the View of Beauty (00:07:50) Encouragement to broaden the view of beauty and appreciate diverse body types to reduce pressure on oneself.
Historical and Cultural Beauty Standards (00:11:40) Examination of historical and cultural influences on beauty standards, including the impact of Eurocentric ideals and colonialism.
The history of body ideals (00:16:00) Historical evolution of body ideals from the Renaissance period to the 19th century, including the impact of slavery and colonization.
Impact of beauty standards (00:17:12) The association of thinness with moral and intellectual superiority, and the growth of the thin ideal of white American femininity.
Roots of fatphobia and thinness obsession (00:18:17) The emergence of fatphobia in response to slavery and the establishment of whiteness as superior, leading to the modern obsession with thinness.
Grief and body image (00:22:20) Addressing the grief associated with body image and the importance of processing emotions related to body ideals.
Embracing neutrality and positivity (00:23:25) Encouragement to bring neutrality and positivity into self-perception and to appreciate one's body in the present.
Shifting focus from external to internal goals (00:27:24) Encouragement to focus on internal goals and abilities rather than external appearance, promoting empowerment and self-worth.
Empowerment and self-reflection (00:28:31) Encouragement to challenge societal beauty standards, appreciate individual beauty, and reflect on personal desires for body change.

Bringing awareness to unconscious body thoughts

Where we can start with challenging some of these thoughts about body comparison is by bringing more awareness to your automatic thoughts around comparison. It can be so unconscious- the language you use around describing other women's bodies will continue to be automatic for the rest of your life unless you actually start bringing awareness and noticing it.

When you start to notice it and pay attention to those places your brain goes, you can say, hang on a second. When I say these phrases while I see a woman's body, it puts a certain body on a pedestal, and creates this idea in my mind of the perfect body type. Because you will notice that the women who you make these comments towards in your mind, they will have a similar body type. It also keeps you in a very narrow frame of mind when it comes to what is a perfect body, or even just an acceptable body.

So when we have these thoughts about comparison, sometimes they’re snap thoughts and they’re pretty automatic. We can’t always control the first thought we have, but we can control the second. So that’s what we want to do, we want to get really aware of when those comparison thoughts come up so we can call them out, and then we want to add in a second thought that is more empowering, that flips the negative comparison thought on its head.

Try out this body image exercise if this is something you struggle with:

Acknowledge and hold space for how you feel in that situation, i.e. “she has a really beautiful body”
Continue the sentence by saying, “wow, she has such a beautiful body. AND mine is good too, because XYZ. Or, she has a beautiful body and there is nothing wrong with mine either, they are just different.

What we’re doing here is bringing your body into this playing field of also being a good body.

It's normal to admire someone else's body. But be really careful about how you’re comparing, and bring in that thought that your body is also a good body, and one body is not inherently better than another body.

We essentially don't want to keep creating this gap, and widening the gap of like, what's perfect to you versus where you're at. Instead, we want to bridge the gap and close it up. We don't want this really narrow view of beauty. We want to try to spread that range out a bit more and just start to notice other body types too. And notice the beauty of them, expand your horizons, and stop reaffirming this narrow definition of beauty of an acceptable or good or perfect body.

The Changing Trends of Women’s Bodies

With this chat on comparison, I think it’s also important to work on broadening your idea of beauty and questioning, where is this idea of the ideal body type from? Who decided that tiny waists, big butts, fake lashes and tinted eyebrows were the prerequisites for a beautiful woman? Was it a magazine? A celebrity? Or was it the beauty industry, which is worth over $128 billion?

Where does this pressure come from with women to look a certain way? On the one hand, you can say, you know, women are always so tough on themselves. But we’re not inherently that way and it's not just out of nowhere- we're trying to look a certain way because we think it's desirable. But where does that idea come from?

Over time, the trend when it comes to female beauty tends to switch between an exaggerated feminine form (big breasts, big bums, long hair) and the rejection of or reaction to that heteronormative feminine ideal (boyish figures, small chests, waif-like bodies). And really interestingly, two examples of this happened in the 1920s and the 1960s-1970s, which both periods that rejected this beauty construct. In the 1920s, what was trendy was a more androgynous look for women where they would flatten their chests with constricting bras, wear loose clothing to hide their curves, and had short hair. What was happening at this time in history in the 1920s was the suffrage movement, where women gained the right to vote. And then in the 1960s and 70s, there was that same rejection of the exaggerated feminine form and there was a preference for the thin body type, with a shift away from the corsets and pinup girls of the years prior. This also coincided with the second wave of the women’s rights movement.

Going alongside this is the idea that in order to attain perfection, women have had to work to change their bodies in some way, whether it was by wearing a corset, dieting and exercising, or getting plastic surgery or injections of some kind. With that we can also see the ‘self-help industry’ grow, which really counts on us wanting to change ourselves to fit into some form of an ideal, some image of ‘perfection’ that you can never actually attain. And we can really see a connection between capitalism, economy and body image. It’s profitable for you to not like yourself and to not like the way you look.

Historical Origins of Your Body Image Issues

So, who has been deciding the beauty standard? I mentioned Eurocentric beauty standards, and if we take a look at the beauty timeline on a map, there is a lot of evidence that shows the origins of beauty standards throughout history have been defined by European and western culture.

The countries in this area were the ones with the most power and influence, and the greatest racial divides at the time. Race is highly connected to our opinions about beauty and what kinds of bodies and features we think are beautiful.

There’s a wide range of evidence that shows the connection between our modern beauty standards and the hatred and fear of fatness and colonization and the slave trade across the Atlantic. The enslavement and forced removal of Africans to Europe and America created a new form of racism to make whiteness distinct from Blackness. This didn’t only include the demonization of Black skin, but identified fatness with Black femininity, which was seen as excessive and inferior. And this is very different from how larger bodies were depicted prior to the slave trade where there are countless images of curvy European women that were seen as the ideal of beauty.

In the Renaissance period just before enslavement, you could clearly see from the artwork at the time that being thicker and curvy was preferred among white women. But aesthetic preferences shifted during the rising slave trade. Black women became increasingly present in art, but were shown as thin, sickly servants, and seen as lowly and inferior.

By the sixteenth century, with slavery and colonization in full force, sugar was also a commodity that was highly accessible, and the changing diet in Europe meant changing body shapes and sudden anxieties around fat, especially among men. And this is when we really start to see thinness as a sign of male rationality and intellectuals like Shakespeare frowned upon overconsumption and labeled it as sign of low intelligence and an obstacle to higher thought. Self-regulation became the key to morality, and gluttony became a sin to be avoided.

A bit later in the seventeenth century was really when fat became a tool for racial categorization where those same connections were being drawn between gluttony and stupidity, but now it was being linked to the characteristics of Africans, whose body types naturally tended to be thicker, curvier, and softer.

With that, food was on a moral level of discipline that was seen to be needed for intellectual pursuit. So it was that time that a thin body had gone from being a sign of sickliness to evidence of the moral and intellectual superiority of Europeans. There was an emphasis placed on the bodies of African women, who were depicted as monstrous and animalistic while also serving as a source of sexual fascination for men.

As the American empire grew in the nineteenth century, the thin ideal of white American femininity also grew after a period of moral panic surrounding American women as too thin. But on the other hand the idea of fat being tied to “African savagery” was still highly popular, and also tied it to being a form of “crime.” As new immigrants arrived, anxieties grew around maintaining the superiority of northwest Europeans. In an effort to define the ideal of American beauty and sustain white supremacy over immigrants and enslaved Africans, thinness grew as a way to separate people based on race and class.

By the 1900s, fat was embedded as a sign of racial Otherness, intellectual inferiority, and moral debasement which set the stage for a century that culminated in the newest moral panic around fat with the “obesity epidemic.”

Without understanding how fatphobia emerged in response to slavery and in order to establish whiteness as superior, we can’t grasp how our modern obsession with thinness is rooted in anti-Blackness. The current manifestation of fatphobia around “obesity” as a public health crisis is deeply reliant on the same ideas that were drawn on to construct fat as a sign of the laziness of body, mind, and spirit.

I know, we don't necessarily think of all this when we think of thinness now and why we prefer it, but it is important to understand that the way our society has been molded over centuries when it comes to beauty standards has impacted the way we think about bodies now. And just because this is how a large portion of society thinks about bodies doesn’t mean this is how we have to think about bodies. And when we can understand the roots, we can use it as a larger reason for why we need to reject it and challenge the way we think in the here and now.

Take that power back and take control of your own beauty. Someone else doesn't have to define it for you or tell you if you fit that mold or not. Take back the power.

Read more about the racial origins of fatbphobia in Sabrina Strings’ “Fearing the Black Body”

I'm currently accepting new clients for one-on-one coaching to help individuals develop a more balanced relationship with movement, food, and their bodies. You can book a free discovery call here or reach out to me on Instagram or send me an email at brittanyallison.rd@gmail.com for more information.

I wish you a wonderful week and weekend and look forward to connecting with you next time! Remember, the journey to a healthier relationship with exercise and food starts with self-reflection and understanding. You’re not alone- we’re in this together.

Until next time,

Britt

Keywords: Food Freedom Life podcast, registered dietitian, shame, shame spiral, binge eating, emotional overeating, acceptance, shame-free, present moment, small gradual changes, high achievers, relationship with food, bodies, whole person, managing binge eating, universal human experience, unworthiness, loss, self-doubt, rejection sensitivity, past experiences of rejection, judgment, normal relationship with food, distorted lens, disordered eating, impact of shame, gradual changes, all-or-nothing mindset, focusing on managing binge eating, societal expectations, fixing symptoms, underlying beliefs, shame triggers, coping behaviors, self-awareness, introspection, positive changes, past experiences, societal messages, body image, self-worth, practical tips, slowing down

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