Dealing with Body Dysmorphic Disorder?

I cannot say that I have ever had body dysmorphia, but my life circumstances were unique in that I had access to medical and anatomy texts and history texts depicting famine victims first as a child before any kind of mainstream fashionable imagery and I believe it made a massive impact on my mind’s foundation of myself because my first instinct when seeing gaunt fashion models was to wonder whether they were suffering from physical illness of some kind rather than thinking they look pretty. Maybe I should make a post about it.

I’ve struggled through this and my aim is to be body neutral, if I can’t manage body positivity - and to NEVER EVER criticise my body and weight in front of my children.

OP, reading your post gave me comfort, somehow. I always felt alone having similar experiences to yours and hence similar resulting feelings. Either men are calling me fat or verbally sexually harassing me. I work out,eat decently healthy food, but I have no clue about how I really look. My friends assure me with loving compliments about my looks, but frankly it gets hard to believe them sometimes. I try really hard to shoo these thoughts out of my mind. I dunno if it is age, but slowly I have stopped getting paranoid about gaining a belly and starting to treat it as a cute part of my body :) Focusing on maintaining healthy lifestyle (not in a workout freak way, but as and when possible) and healthy diet is what I'm trying to do now without stressing myself much.

In my experience, men who point out parts of my body (whether complimentary or not) are really telling me that they don't see *me* they just see my body. Sure, looks matter for attraction- but most people are pretty attractive and it's just an initial factor in a relationship. When men I've dated for a while begin making comments about specific parts of my body (usually it's one of the big 3, but, boobs or thighs) it's the beginnings of them piecing me up to better objectify me. They start with targeted compliments, then they become 'observations' and suddenly you realize that they've stopped complimenting *you* and stopped checking in and caring to know about *you* I've only dated one guy who didn't let his compliments on my body take over every interaction we had- and he was his own kind of messed up (that lead me to FDS in the first place) TLDR; don't internalize when men objectify you, even if that man has a good track record- he's telling you he only wants to see you as a series of parts

I've been severely underweight most of my life due to restricting. I look horribly overweight in the mirror, but in pictures I can see I'm very thin. I've always worn my thinness as a badge of honor- I remember hearing Kate Moss's quote "You can never be too rich or too thin" a long time ago and it burrowed into my brain like a parasite. When people have said, "You're too skinny" or even "Are you anorexic?" I've taken it as a compliment. But in truth, I didn't look good at all. I had (still have) massive muscle atrophy from being sedentary (it's nearly impossible to work out when you're exhausted from self starvation). I think it worked against me in my custody battle, too. Imagine what the judge must have thought when I took my ex to custody because he is a meth addict, while there I was looking like one myself.

Anyway, I'm done with thin. I want to be strong. I joined a gym and am working on my diet- trying to get more protein and calories in. I've been watching videos of women who are recovering from EDs and working on "making gains" in the gym. Those can be extreme, too, sometimes. So I try to use my discernment and always remind myself I'm doing this from a place of self-love.

I'm sorry you're dealing with trauma from men's comments. There is no pleasing most of them, anyway. If we're skinny, they'll make us feel bad for not being curvy. If we're curvy, they'll make us feel fat. Just remember that many of them are operating under red piller advice and don't even believe the things they say- they're just trying to neg us and keep us unbalanced.

Hugs.

honestly, i still struggle with it.

cultivating the disciplines of olympic weightlifting and powerlifting helped me feel strong, allowed me to see food as fuel and took some of the emotional volatility out of nourishing myself.

i get hydrostatic lean mass tests every 2 months or so. when left to my own devices, i undereat. i lost some lean mass recently because of an ingrained tendency to want to cut calories in order to get leaner. eating less makes it harder to build healthy muscle, bones and skin. seeing the data from these tests makes it easier for me to see what’s happening with my body so i can remind myself that i need to stay strong and healthy and intervene before anything gets too out of balance.

i track my macros to make sure i’m consistently getting enough, and i monitor my athletic performance metrics, mood, sleep, energy levels, menstrual cycle and resting heart rate. life is difficult enough without starving myself. i need all of the help i can get mentally, physically and emotionally, and proper nourishment ensures that i can interact with life optimally.

i‘m resigned to the fact that i just can’t see my body clearly. de-centering men helps tremendously. focusing on my non-physical character helps as well. i like to create Pinterest boards with pins of images that symbolize me energetically.

women as a class have been so brainwashed about our bodies and dieting. it’s going to take a long time to unlearn the BS, but i’ve come a long way with a lot of hard work…and you can too.

Oh I entirely agree, I merely intended to lend the pearls of wisdom from my past experience as examples.