Is Your Body Image Getting In The Way of Your Sex Life?

 

If it were true that losing weight improved body image, studies would show that thinner people are more satisfied with the way their body looks than normal weight people.  But they aren’t.  Studies consistently show that underweight folks are nearly as dissatisfied with their bodily appearance as normal or overweight people.  

Nobody is immune to distorted body perceptions–not ordinary people who force themselves to eat dust for dinner nor supermodels that treat cocaine as a food group.  This is how bad the situation is:  Slender men and women consistently overestimate their body size more than heavier ones!  There are talent agencies that don’t even bother putting their models on a plane; they just fax them to the photo shoot.  Yet these walking sheets of paper have something in common with the truly overweight–they think their butts are too big.

So do professional ballet dancers.  Who doesn’t envy these petite flowers?  If anyone knows more about their bodies, it’s dancers who scrutinize their physical appearance for a living.  Yet one famous survey showed ballerinas significantly over-estimated their true percent of body fat!

The fact that thinner people may have an even worse body image than you do is difficult to grasp.  It violates one of your deepest beliefs–that if you lost weight you’d feel better about your body.  But it’s true.  Losing weight rarely results in an uptick in body confidence because nearly all gay men are dissatisfied with their bodies.  In the past five years, researchers have come to the conclusion that body dissatisfaction is so widespread that they’ve labeled the phenomenon “normative discontent.” 

In English, it means body dissatisfaction is the new normal.  It is now standard and predictive that most people have a negative body image–no matter how skinny or how fat they are.  It is now normal for most people to diet and try to lose weight, even if they objectively don’t need to.  Even if it’s medically dangerous for them to try.

But What If You Really Are Fat?

Then you should lose weight.  But not because you’ll feel better about your body; because you’ll feel better period.  Remember, an over-all sense of well-being is more important to sexual fulfillment than body image.  It’s hard to see how the health consequences of being overweight contributes to well-being.  

You should not rely on your own opinion to decide if you should lose weight.  Your ability to make an informed decision is too compromised by your desire to look like those media models.  Instead, use the tool preferred by most physicians–BMI.   While there are real problems associated with BMI if you’re shorter or more muscular than average, there is no better, independent way of figuring out your weight status, outside of going to a doctor. 

Use the National Institute For Health’s automatic BMI calculator or a BMI chart produced by any reputable medical organization.  If you find yourself outside the healthy weight category (defined as a BMI over 24.9) it’s time to change your eating and exercise habits. 

Notice I didn’t say “it’s time to diet.”  That’s because dieting doesn’t work.  Depending on which systematic review of dieting’s effectiveness you look at, the failure rate is somewhere between 80 and 95%!

Instead of dieting, try changing the eating habits that contribute to weight gain.  There are hundreds of scientific studies showing, for example, how to stop making yourself hungry, how to eat less without feeling deprived and how to train yourself to crave fruits and vegetables.  The best program we’ve seen is an online weight loss class called Neuroslim. It relies on scientists outside the diet industry for its techniques.

Okay, next week we’re going to talk about how to improve your body image so that it adds, rather than detracts, from your love life.