Have you ever looked in the mirror and been dismayed by the cellulite on your thighs or the wrinkles around your eyes? Have you thought about buying a new bathing suit but cringed at the idea of looking at yourself in the dressing room mirror? Have you ever longed to be taller, thinner, younger, or stronger?
If you answered yes to any of these questions, you are not alone. In fact, you are among the 80 to 90 percent of women, and growing number of men, who dislike their physical appearance and are dissatisfied with their bodies. Body hatred has become an epidemic of unfathomable proportions in this culture.
How does this dissatisfaction manifest itself in your life? In more ways than you might imagine. Beauty and body size are often associated with success—in romance, business, or any other facet of life, and if you don’t think you meet society’s “beauty ideal,” you may feel inadequate, ashamed, and embarrassed. Consciously or unconsciously, you suffer unnecessarily because you don’t think you are beautiful enough, thin enough, or good enough to live the life of your dreams, the life you deserve. You accept less, much less, than you truly want, need, or deserve, because you feel inadequate about your body and yourself.
The truth is that your sense of inadequacy is an illusion, or more a delusion. Yes, it’s true. Many Americans suffer from this grand delusion: If I am not thin/tall/toned/beautiful/young enough, I can’t live my life fully or realize my dreams. Rather than truly loving our bodies, minds, and souls, we want to nip and tuck, slice and dice, starve and purge our way to being adequate. We think we need to change something about ourselves in order to be deserving of love, attention, and affection.
What Is Negative Body Obsession?
This deluded sense of inadequacy has a name: Negative Body Obsession, or NBO. NBO is a condition marked by a near-constant critical rumination on one’s appearance. Though NBO has yet to show up in the psychologist’s bible Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders, it is a very real, very prevalent, and, dare I say, nearly ubiquitous condition in modern society.
