Can a Meditation Practice Improve Body Image?

CW: dieting details, disordered thought patterns

Let me tell you a little story. 

It’s about how I decided to give up dieting. 

It all started one summer evening in 2014 when I was 31. I was in my car, just back from a social gathering where I felt unattractive and unwanted and had been comparing myself to other women and wondering why men didn’t want me. Sad!! Boring…and true. It was raining outside and I didn’t want to get out of my car so I was just sitting there, waiting for the rain to let up, dwelling on how miserable I was. And my mind, like it was so wont to do in those days, started blaming my size for my misfortunes. 

Specifically, I started chastising myself for having gained weight…again.

The previous summer, I had done a very well-known and extreme “cleanse.” One day in the middle of it, I saw a man happily carrying a pizza box down the street and I cried. I lost a very concerning amount of weight in less than two weeks. I felt gorgeous and superior to everyone when I reintroduced food back into my life and decided that my new favorite was cilantro. Then I started actually eating again, gained the weight back, and–you guessed it–blamed myself. 

Here I was, a year later, feeling utterly hopeless and miserable. As I sobbed freely, my wails drowned out by the heavy rain, my mind wandered over to a new thought: I was exhausted. I was so freaking tired of being knocked around by this rollercoaster whiplash of feeling worthy and gorgeous and superior one day and worthless and monstrous and outcast the next. I was coming to my wit’s end. A shocking thought made a brief appearance…I think I might prefer just being bigger than continuing to go through this. 

Almost ten years later, I was diagnosed as being in recovery from anorexia. Looking back, I know that this was the moment that something started to shift. This was the moment that I started to move towards something new. At the time, it felt like I was giving up. Now I realize that it was the moment I started to choose healing and find myself. 

I’ve thought about this moment over the years–when my mind suddenly had the time and space and inclination to go somewhere new. In yoga philosophy, the patterns of the mind are called samskaras and they are often compared to the grooves on a record. The needle falls on the deep grooves that are established and have been followed time and time AND TIME again. For me, that groove was the pattern of losing weight, feeling fantastic, and then regaining it and feeling like a failure–a groove that was first created when I was fourteen and attended my first summer at weight loss camp. 

Up until that point, the feelings of failure and despair upon gaining weight were typically followed by recommitting to a plan: diet, exercise, rinse, repeat. But this time, there was a new variation–the record needle jumped! There was an awareness–a tiny bit of distance and space between my thoughts where I was able to step back and make a new observation: This pattern is exhausting. Maybe I can have better than this. 

Why and how did this happen? Meditation offers a possible explanation. I started meditating in 2009 and by 2014, I’d had a few periods of consistent practice (on and off) and I do think it’s possible that it might have had something to do with it. Since then, with much more meditation practice under my belt, I’ve certainly experienced something similar many times; a stronger awareness of what is going on in my mind and a greater distance between my thoughts and emotions. This distance enables me to pull myself out from the middle of an emotional spiral and become an observer of my experience. I become the witness. It’s the difference between thinking, “I am fat and ugly” and “Oh look, I seem to be telling myself that I’m fat and ugly again.” It’s an extremely powerful difference. It’s a difference that hints that maybe I have some power and choice in the movements of my own mind. It suggests that I am something other than the thinker of my thoughts…I am the one who observes. 

Once you see it, you can’t unsee it. 

Vedanta (the philosophy of the Vedas, which are the most ancient scriptures of India) explores these ideas in great detail. It offers teachings that allow us to harness the power of the mind, with the goal of ultimately overcoming our attachments–including our attachment to our own notion of self. Personally, I’m not seeking enlightenment. Right now I’m working on remembering that coming back to my meditation practice is a powerful tool for helping me to remember that many of my thoughts are patterns, and that I have some choice in which patterns I want to strengthen. How do we actually do this without toxic positivity and spiritual bypassing? That’s a topic for another post. For now, I’m just gonna spend some more time sitting–care to join me?

I help people learn to medtate, create a meditation routine that works for them, and heal from negative body image in my work as a body liberation yoga therapist.