How much of it is body dismorphia?

There are absolutely people who aren't happy with their appearance, regardless of the progress. The truth is our happiness with our bodies has a lot of to do with things other than what our bodies actually look like. Happiness with ones body really comes from within. Sometimes we have to accept that the standards that we have been influenced to think are realistic really aren't, and that it's okay if our bodies never get there.

I am still 20 pounds overweight, and I feel like I am "happy" with my body. That doesn't mean I am not trying still to change it. Of course I want to improve. But feeling positive about how I am now is a choice that I try to make.

alondrakar wrote: »

Interested in your thoughts - are there people here who will never been happy with their appearance no matter the progress made? I thought about this during my walk yesterday. I was looking at my arm and it seemed so slim/skinny. It was as though I was looking at someone else's arm because in my opinion, this arm I was staring at did not match the body that I see in the mirror every morning. So I wonder, even if I lost the other 10-15 pounds, will it be enough?

Are there such people? Sure. Sometimes it's easy to see, in a particular thread (often, it's young women who already very thin, but see themselves as fat, or young men who call themselves "skinny fat" but feel they must cultivate such low intake that even the best strength training program can't help them achieve their desired "look"). In other cases, it's more borderline or questionable whether the person's self-perception is askew. (Some of us like different "looks" vs. others.)

I think many/most of us who lose weight are likely to have a temporary period of disconnect where we look in the mirror and see ourselves as we think of ourselves based on long experience, not as we actually appear at the moment. It takes some time for the self-perception to catch up. (Even my thin-person clothes looked absurdly tiny to me for awhile; now they look normal, and the old ones look huge. ).

But inaccurate visual self-perception is one thing, and self-disgust or distaste is another. And unrealistic goals are yet another: Wanting to look like an IG fitspo model who only looks that particular way with the right lighting, pose, dehydration, photoshop, etc.; or wanting to look like a body type that is not within the realm of possible for our individual skeletal structure. (I will never have narrow shoulders, or delicately-thin fingers (which is fine with me, BTW, but if it weren't . . . .)).

I think it's useful to find a way to locate one's sense of self-value in something instead of or at least in addition to appearance: Health, performance, feeling great, being the best self we can be, good character, generosity, empathy, intelligence, knowledge, whatever. I also think it's possible to be happy or at least reasonably point-in-time satisfied with one's appearance, while still wanting to work on improving it. I'm pretty happy with my body - it's strong and can do pretty cool stuff - but I can think of ways I'd like to improve.

Will you be happy with your appearance in 10-15 pounds? Of course no one else can answer that, but I suspect you can be, partly based on whether you decide to be . . . even if you still want to work on improvements. Just guessing, though. :flowerforyou:

Dismorphia doesn't stand a chance against David: "I am great and fearfully made".

There are definitely people who will never be happy, and sometimes I feel that way about myself. What has made me realize the amount of weight I have lost is getting new clothes that actually fit. I tried a new pair of pants the other day and exclaimed to my husband that they made me look skinny. His response was, "Of course you look thin, you ARE thin." Until that moment though I didn't see myself as thin. I think wearing ill fitting, baggy clothes made it impossible to actually see myself as a smallet size. Even today, I received a half marathon training shirt in the mail and thought it looked so nice, but then told my husband I didn't think it would fit because it looked so small. He told me to out it on, and sure enough it fits perfectly. For me, I think it is just going to take some time to adjust to my new size.

I would guess that it's not common, simply because if you look at a random group of people in a Western country, the majority of them are overweight or obese. Half of these will be dieting, with a sampling similar to what it's like here on mfp.

I'm sure that there are people with body dismorphia, but I've never met someone in real life with it. I have met many people on a diet.

I am in a really weird place right now when it comes to how I see myself and how I feel about my body. Historically, I have always felt like I was "too fat," except one time I got on the scale when I was 16 and saw that I was 112 lbs. It was at that moment that I realized, I'm really not fat and should probably stop restricting what I am eating. Now, I am at my heaviest weight at 203 lbs, I am unhappy about how I look and how I feel, but I also tell myself "you're not THAT big." So I went from thinking I was "too fat" when I was at an ideal weight for my height to thinking it's not THAT bad, when in reality, it is. I look in the mirror, I see one thing. I look at pictures of myself, I see another thing. I feel like I can't trust what I "see" anymore. I am working on loving myself the way that I am now while making daily healthy choices with the knowledge that it all comes together, eventually.