Understanding and Overcoming Body Checking
Body checking is a common behaviour for those struggling with body image concerns or eating disorders, yet it can be a major barrier to recovery. This behaviour often involves frequently evaluating the body’s appearance or size through practices like mirror checking, weighing, and pinching or measuring specific body parts. While these actions might seem harmless, body checking can deeply reinforce self-worth being tied to weight and appearance, ultimately fueling cycles of low self-esteem and anxiety.
In this blog, we’ll explore what body checking looks like, why it’s harmful, and ways to start breaking free from this habit.
What is Body Checking?
Body checking can manifest in many different ways, but some of the most common forms include:
Mirror Checking: Frequently checking your reflection in mirrors, windows, or other reflective surfaces to assess appearance.
Taking Photos: Taking or saving photos of yourself to analyse and compare body changes over time.
Weighing: Stepping on the scale often - sometimes multiple times a day - to monitor even the smallest changes in weight.
Measuring or Pinching: Measuring body parts or pinching skin to feel for bones, often in an attempt to gauge changes in size or weight.
While many people check their appearance from time to time, body checking is often obsessive and is used as a way to seek reassurance or control. However, instead of offering comfort, it usually heightens anxiety and creates a self-critical loop.
Why Body Checking is Harmful
Body checking reinforces the investment of self-worth into physical appearance, which can have harmful effects regardless of the outcome.
When You Feel Worse After Checking: When body checking results in dissatisfaction, it can leave you feeling frustrated, ashamed, or anxious. This often leads to an increase in behaviours that negatively impact well-being, such as restrictive eating, excessive exercise, or avoidance of social activities.
When You Feel Better After Checking: Positive feelings after body checking are still problematic. This sense of reassurance is usually temporary, creating a need to keep checking as soon as doubts creep back in. This reinforces reliance on appearance as a measure of self-worth and makes self-acceptance dependent on fluctuating, external factors.
In either scenario, body checking traps people in a cycle of reliance on appearance for self-validation, which disrupts a sense of genuine self-worth and limits self-acceptance to how the body looks on any given day.
Tips for Reducing Body Checking Behaviors
Breaking free from body checking takes time, but with patience and practice, it is possible to replace these habits with healthier coping strategies. Here are some tips to get started:
Limit Mirrors and Avoid Reflections: Try limiting the mirrors in your space or covering them if possible. This can help reduce mirror-checking behaviors over time. Additionally, practice looking away from reflective surfaces like windows to avoid accidentally checking yourself.
Set a Goal for Reducing Scale Use: If weighing yourself is a habit, start by setting a goal to cut back gradually, like reducing it to once a week, then even less frequently. With time, try shifting your focus from weight to other factors, such as how you feel physically and emotionally.
Notice Triggers and Practice Awareness: Body checking is often triggered by certain situations, like leaving the house or eating a meal. Try keeping a journal to note the times you feel the urge to body-check and explore what emotions or thoughts might be triggering it. Awareness of patterns can help break the cycle.
Replace Checking with Supportive Actions: When you feel the urge to body-check, replace it with a supportive activity like taking a few deep breaths, reminding yourself of a positive affirmation, or calling a friend. Redirecting the impulse can help distance self-worth from physical appearance.
Focus on Function and Gratitude: Shifting the focus from appearance to body function can be powerful. Reflect on the ways your body supports you and the activities you enjoy. You might even consider writing down things you’re grateful for that have nothing to do with your appearance.
Seek Support: Reducing body-checking behaviours can be difficult, especially if they’ve been part of your routine for a long time. A therapist can provide additional tools, support, and accountability to help you make meaningful progress.
Reclaiming Your Self-Worth
Learning to reduce body-checking is ultimately about reclaiming your self-worth and moving it away from weight and appearance. Each step you take toward decreasing these behaviours helps create room for self-compassion, acceptance, and a stronger, healthier relationship with yourself.
Breaking free from body-checking habits is a gradual process, and setbacks are natural. Remember that every effort, no matter how small, is a step toward greater self-respect and freedom from self-criticism. If this resonates with you, take it one day at a time - each moment of self-kindness brings you closer to true self-acceptance.