486-The Psychology of Body Acceptance

So let's talk about why we hate our body, right? Which is why, why a portion of people went on GLP-1, why some of us dieted for decades, and it has to do with our self-concept, how we s- see ourselves into the world.

So comes in the self-objectification theory, which was, um, created or researched, uh, by someone named Barbara Fredrickson and Tommy Ann Roberts in 1997, and it's been wildly accepted as the theory that explained why women hate their body.

So the self-objectification theory tells us that when a person learns in their upbringing to view themselves as a physical object first instead of being a human being first, they, they being people identified as women, land into a place of seeking to meet the standard for that object, which is their body, which we know to be the patriarchal beauty standard.

And there's, there's the pursuit of meeting those standards set up by patriarchy.

And because we don't have a way of meeting the thin ideal or the eternal youth ideal, we're constantly in a state of failure, and we s- we develop body dissatisfaction, which is the clinical term, or body hatred, and we develop what is known clinically as body image issue.

So body image or body hatred is disproportionately experienced by women.

Though there's a new trend that, uh, in the people, uh, identified as men, what is predominantly experienced is a relationship to muscularity, right? Um, so it's not about being thin for men.

It's about being muscular, and the inability to reach that muscular state creates body image or body dissatisfaction.

So it's very gendered.

A- and, and whoever you identify to the gender, you then are experiencing the variation of the self-objectification theory.

Now that, the way you learn to see yourself as an object instead of a human starts at a very young age, and that's another psychological concept called socialization, whereas we're the only species, the only animal species to do that is human because we have a very evolved and complex brain.

Our babies are born, we're born, with what I call a blank computer, blank slate in your brain, and we need to load up coding in our brain to be able to survive in society.

So that...

It's very simplified, but you get the idea.

The concept is the process of loading up information in your brain from the age of, like, two, three years old to early 20s to become a fully functional human is called a socialization.

We socialize human on many, many, many things, and one of them being their identity based on their gender.

And in the case of us women, because this podcast is made for women, we are socialized that we are a body and that we are existing for the gaze.

In this case, predominantly, predominantly a male gaze over the body.

So the reason we have a body is to be pleasing, is to be objectified as a thin youth piece of beauty, piece of meat, a- a- arm candy, right? That's our-- that's the purpose of our body.

And since there's no trick, there's no even GLP-1, which is supposedly a miracle drug to get us there, it doesn't work, we then adopt all kinds of coping mechanism pattern.

I'm gonna just give you some here, but, like, body checking, right? We're constantly checking our body.

We're surveilling.

Another thing in body image work that's called body surveillance, where we're constantly surveilling, surveilling our body.

So in the case of weight, we're constantly monitoring our weight on the scale.

We're monitoring what we eat, which I'm not gonna talk about it today, but then creates eating disturbance and disordered eating, eating disorder.