episode 179: how to stop hating yourself in photos
In this episode 179 of The Diet Diaries I explore our complex relationship with photos and negative body image as I dive into the emotional and psychological impacts of seeing ourselves in pictures.
Why do hate how we look in photos? How can we see ourselves more kindly and objectively? You'll discover why diets aren't the solution and learn practical skills to improve your relationship with your body.
We'll discuss:
The surprising ways photos can distort reality and how to use this knowledge as a skill
Practical strategies for dealing with negative feelings and body image issues when you see your photos.
How to shift your focus from appearance to the joy and experiences captured in photos
The role of self trust
You’ve already spent too much time, energy and attention obsessing over how you look in photos. Don’t spend another summer doing the same thing.
Check out this blog post with my top 3 skills to improve body image issues.
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179
[00:00:00] Good morning, friends. I'm recording this on Monday, May 13th. This episode is going to be live on Monday, May 20th. And today is actually going to be the first day of Soft Body Summer. I'm talking about it a week in advance. Um, So thank you to everyone who hopefully has joined and signed up, because as of the time I'm recording this, registration has just opened, so we'll see what happens.
But like I said, when I put it out there, if only one person signs up, it will be worth it. Um, this work is something, truthfully, that I That literally we all need to do, but a lot of us, um, don't fully realize that, don't want to take the time, are scared, are nervous, um, still believe that a diet is the way to fix it.
And, um, sometimes we just need time [00:01:00] to kind of figure that out for ourselves. I'm not here to put you on a timeline. Um, I think we will all get there eventually. So if you're here and you're doing the work with me, Because I am doing it alongside you for sure. Thank you. Um, so what I wanted to talk about today is very much in the vein, though, of all of this, and that is about photos and how we deal with ourselves in photos.
This has been coming up a lot lately with many of my clients. Um, obviously this is just a, a, systemic problem, struggle that we as humans have. And, um, I want to talk about it and I want to talk about it in the context, what I usually try to do, not always, but of giving you some skills, some ways to respond and deal with it, not just to commiserate and say, yeah, me too.
Which, yes, me too. Like, I see myself in photos and I'm not happy all the time. But what I do to respond to that, how I work with it, because again, [00:02:00] we always think that a diet is the answer to everything. Any discomfort, any dislike, any unease we have with what we look like or how we feel in our body, immediately the solution is a diet.
is a diet. I need to eat less. I need to cut out food. I need to work out more. It may be true that there are some things you need to work on in terms of your relationship with food and what you're eating and how you're eating and why you're eating. Yes. And also a diet is not the answer to that. Learning skills are the answer to that.
Um, I will stand by this that a diet, restricting, manipulating, controlling food, punishing yourself through food in any way is not a viable solution. long term solution support mechanism. It never has been, is not, and never will be. So here's what I want to talk about today. And I talked about this on social media a [00:03:00] little bit at this point.
It'll be like a couple of weeks ago, where I show a lot, I mean, I show my pictures and videos of myself constantly. constantly. And if you think that I love how I look in all those photos and videos, like, you've got another think coming. Um, I just don't. Like, I'm a human. And so the, the objective with this is not to get you to like how you look in every picture.
It's to help you be able to look at that picture objectively. with less emotion and not let it change your behavior, not let it change your action, not let it dominate and control your every thought. It's so that you can keep living and functioning and not being obsessed with how you looked in that photo and the actions that you take as a result of that obsession.
So I wanted to start off by talking about what a photo is and what a photo isn't, right? We live in the age of selfies and iPhone photos. We, my family has not owned a camera in many, many years. And I [00:04:00] know many families are the same. Um, And I would say that this is true even for when we did have cameras, it was just much less frequent and much less prevalent because we had to obviously back in the day develop pictures, shotgun doubles, anyone?
Um, so you didn't see the outcome of that photo for weeks. Sometimes even more if you forgot about a roll of film, right? And then in the age of when we had digital cameras and you could look on that little tiny screen, that definitely shifted things. Um, but because it was still on a camera that got put away, it's not in the same way as with an iPhone where your photos are at your fingertips constantly.
And it's a big screen, relatively speaking, compared to like what a digital camera screen was, which was like two inches by two inches. And you're constantly looking at photos and posting photos and we literally live in a generation of like, photos are such a huge part of our life. Um, and the volume of photos and the frequency of photos that we take [00:05:00] and have and hold on to, um, is literally changing so much about our lives that we don't even realize.
And so any photo is heavily, completely influenced by lighting. by angles, by composition, by perspective, by dimension. I mean this is what professional photographers do and they learn how to manipulate in a good way and sometimes in a negative way, all of these variables. So who are we, people casually taking photos on our phones, to think that we, oh god these fireworks, to think that we can control all of that in a way that suits us.
We can't. So much can be manipulated and controlled with a photo. You know that. Though the angle at which you hold your phone to take a picture of [00:06:00] yourself can make you look drastically different. I need to do another post on this soon, I've done it before. Not to mention then filters and lenses and lighting and editing and all of these things that can be done to photos.
So when you see a photo of someone, you don't actually know what you're looking for. what, if anything, has been done to it, which is a little bit of like a separate conversation. I really want to talk about when we see ourselves in photos, something that we've taken of us or that a friend or family member has taken of us and immediately be like, let me see the photo.
Let me see it. You can't post that. Don't post that. You can't post that. You have to delete that. You have to delete that, right? How often do those words come out of your mouth? And you look at the photo and you're like, oh my God, I look disgusting. Look at my thighs. I look so fat. I'm gross. I have to go on a diet.
Like we just talk about how disgusting we look very often in front of our kids. Okay, like, just think about that. But a photo, getting back to, like, objectively, like, what a photo is and what a photo isn't, we are 3D bodies moving through a 3D [00:07:00] environment, right? We are not flat. But a photo is a flat representation.
So it is taking a 3D object and flattening it. That's what it is. So right off the bat, it's very hard to capture. Especially without the skill, none of us have the skills in taking photos. the movement and the existence of a 3D object image in a 2D plane. There's so much that happens technologically speaking to manipulate that, to make that happen.
And again, we can manipulate, and we, what we look like is manipulated by lighting, by angles, by positioning, by perspective, by dimension, um, by lenses, camera lenses. play a huge role in this. And so my point in bringing this up is that we have to get objective, we have [00:08:00] to get clinical about what a photo is and a photo isn't.
And knowing that just, even take away, just bring that down to the lens on the, on the camera. Like the lens on the front of the iPhone, which is a lot what we do selfies with versus the lenses on the back are very different. If you take a picture of a selfie with an iPhone looking at you from the front, like the selfie way.
And then you stay in that exact same position, turn the camera around and have someone take the picture of you using the actual lenses, the photo will look very different. Because of the angle at which you're holding the camera out in front of you, because of the lens on that camera, because of the lighting, like, so all this to say that a photo can take reality and manipulate it in whatever way we want.
It can manipulate things to look different. Different, meaning objectively different, different meaning good different, different meaning bad different, which is all opinion, and again that becomes subjective, but different than reality. I [00:09:00] hear so many people say, I see myself in the mirror and then I see a photo of myself and there's a total disconnect between what I thought I saw in the mirror and what I see in that photo.
That is not, that happens to me all the time. I look at myself in the mirror, even as I'm taking the photo, because a lot of the photos I take are not selfies, they are a reflection of me in the mirror. But as soon as I put a camera lens on that, it manipulates it, like physically. And by physically, I mean the science of physics, which is kind of what like photography is, um, physically manipulates it.
So that what I see in the mirror, and then I take the photo of myself in the mirror, it does not look the same. Because it, it's shrinking it, or it's enlarging it, it's changing the angle, it's changing the perspective. All these things are happening. So what you see in the mirror, like we can look down at ourselves and look at parts of ourselves.
We can never see our own face unless we look in the mirror, which is like kind of a total like mindfuck if you ask [00:10:00] me, and we can't see our back. And again, when we look down at ourselves, it's a different perspective than when we in the mirror at different angles. Like, there are times where I will look down at my belly and be like, oh my god, my stomach looks huge right now.
And then, like, for social media, I will take pictures of my body and share it to show what I experience, to show what I feel, to show body diversity and representation. So I'll take a picture of myself in that angle, like, of my stomach, and then I'll look at the picture and be like, wow, that's different than what I see when I look down at myself.
Well, of course it is, because it's a different angle. When you look at something from a different angle. It's going to look different, which is normal, but yet when it comes to our bodies, that goes out the window and we totally forget that that is normal. So one of my number one pieces of advice to give you in terms of practicing a skill is to remember that a photo is a manipulation and an incomplete representation of reality.
And [00:11:00] you're going to have to remind yourself of that. You're going to have to talk yourself through that. When you look in the mirror and you are happy or feel good about what you see. You have to practice taking that at face value and prepare yourself that a photo may not reflect back what you see in the mirror.
It doesn't mean that what you saw in the mirror was false. It doesn't mean that you have body dysmorphia. It doesn't mean that what you didn't see was real or that you tricked yourself or that you are out of touch with reality. It simply means that the camera on that, the lens on that camera did what it does, which is manipulates lighting, angles, positions, all of these things.
And so really at its core, like. This is what this skill is about, is remembering what a camera is and a camera isn't. Um, there's just so much variability to that. There's so much variability that professional photographers like use that to their advantage to capture images in the [00:12:00] way that they need to or want to for whatever their purpose is.
Um, and that to get a, a photograph that looks the way you see in yourself in the mirror. It's very difficult and I would say nearly impossible with an iPhone. And that if you can manipulate a photo to look, quote, better, again, that's all subjective, based on the angle at which you hold the phone. For instance, you only want someone to take a picture of you from above so that you don't have a double chin, right?
That's a manipulating of a photo. We have to use that same logic and that same capability to know that when someone else, that we're holding the phone at a different angle, or someone else is taking a photo of us, that the angle that they're taking that photo at, maybe may not like that one. But that doesn't mean that what we saw in the mirror before we left isn't true or didn't happen.
We have to get objective. We have to get factual. This is one of the skills we're talking about in Soft Body [00:13:00] Summer, about what is actually happening here. There's so much emotion wrapped up in it and we have to work on stripping that away and we work on stripping that away not by telling ourselves don't be upset you're being stupid and speaking unkindly but to really look at like the facts of what a photo is and isn't, how a camera works.
Um, and kind of connecting back to what you see in the mirror, like if you look in the mirror and you're like, okay, like I feel good. I feel good enough. I feel neutral, whatever it is. You've got to trust that. You've got to believe that you can trust what you see. And this isn't about loving what you see.
Sometimes it's being like, alright, you know what, some days, like, this is just good enough. And then you may see a picture of that good enough and be like, oh my god, what was I thinking? No. Like, you've got to then come back and remember that you trusted what you saw. You can't, We put so much trust in these external things, in, in an app to tell us how [00:14:00] much food we're allowed to eat, on a scale to tell us our self worth and what kind of mood we're allowed to be in, in a photo to tell us how we look.
We are outsourcing way too much of our self trust to external things that don't know what's going on inside of our body. Only we know that. What we feel, what we, what we sense, what we think, only we know that. And that's part of what this is too, um, you know, and I think something else I talked about that I wanted to mention here, um, kind of two, two big things is that we rely, we look at photos as a capturing of what we look like.
What about what we're doing in that photo? Where we were, who we were with, what we were experiencing. What about that piece of it? You know, you're at the beach and you're sitting in the [00:15:00] sands. or you're swimming, or whatever it is, or you're sitting on a chair and someone takes a photo of you, and so your belly is round and rolling, and your thighs are spreading, and maybe the way the sunlight's hitting you, you can see your cellulite.
And you see that photo and you're like, oh my god, I look disgusting. I look gross. This is terrible. Delete that. And maybe in that moment, you were having a great fucking time on your vacation. You were laying in the sun, you were relaxing, you were having a drink, you were reading a book, you were listening to music, and you were great.
And not until you saw that photo of yourself did you think about what you looked like. And then that photo strips away all the joy that you felt in that moment and makes it only about what you look like. We have to remember that being alive is is about so much more than the appearance of our body living life.
It is about what we are experiencing and what we are feeling and who we are with and what [00:16:00] we did and what we learned and saw and heard and all these things. And a photo can capture that. To me, that's actually what the most amazing photographers do when they're people is capturing maybe what someone was experiencing or feeling.
And that is a really important part of what photos are, except we have reduced them down to a reflection of what we think we look like or what we should look like. And that is, we are doing such a huge, huge disservice to ourselves when we do that. So again, another skill becomes, maybe I don't like how I look in this photo because it was You know, this was the angle, or this was the lighting, or remembering that a photo lens, a camera lens is not, is distorting reality.
But I was having a great time. This is a memory of something I want to remember. And so I'm gonna hang on to this photo because of that. And that has value, and that has meaning. So that is something that I really wanted to bring up today, [00:17:00] again, to get you to think about. Um, And then another piece of this is, I mean, I've posted many photos of myself, and I know a lot of other people have as well, posted photos of themselves in smaller bodies, in clothing, at all sorts of times of life when they were going through severe disordered eating or even, um, like a clinical eating disorder.
going through severe depression, mental illness, going through one of the hardest times of their lives, and you see a photo of them and, and you objectively think they look great. Because maybe their body is smaller and we immediately think, Oh, a smaller body. They look great. They must be so happy. And then that person will come out and say, I was going through one of the worst times of my life.
I was, I was, um, sick with an eating disorder. Um, a family member of mine was really sick and I was extremely stressed out and I lost a ton of weight. I have photos of myself after I did Isagenix, one of the extreme diets that I've done. [00:18:00] Um, And I look happy, and I knew I was wearing clothes that I hadn't worn in a long time, and people were complimenting me left and right because I had lost like 15 pounds in a month, and I was miserable inside because I was so terrified of what was going to happen when I wasn't drinking those shakes anymore.
And I look, people think I look great on the outside and I look happy and I'm smiling, but on the inside I was a disaster. So a photo,
often, very often, and rarely, captures that. So if someone can look aesthetically a certain way, or smile, or have their hair done, or put on makeup, and look great on the outside, does that automatically mean they're happy and feel good on the inside? Fuck no! That goes back to the same assumption we make that when someone loses weight and is in a smaller body, they're automatically a happier person.
No! Because people at every size and every shape, from [00:19:00] a size 2 to a women who are in size two bodies still complain about themselves, still are unhappy, still don't like how they look. So why do we think that that's the answer? Right? Why do we think that's the answer? That's a little bit of like a side topic I'm going off on.
But if we can look at a photo of someone who looks a certain way, but we know factually we find out is feeling a totally different way inside, then why can't the reverse be true? Meaning, We see a photo of ourselves in which we don't like how we look because we see cellulite, we see rolls, we see fat, we see things that we have been taught to believe are bad, wrong, unattractive, ugly, a problem.
But we're having a great time. We're with people we love. We were dancing. We were at a wedding. We were at a party. We were at the beach. We were on a fucking amazing family vacation. A trip we'd been waiting to take for years. Why can't we see that experience happening, just because we don't like how we [00:20:00] look, doesn't mean that there's so much else happening in that photo.
And I just think it's so important that we, we, we, we reduce a photo down to like, something that it's not even necessarily meant to capture, and we lose sight of reality. Of what a photo is and isn't, of how a photo works, the science behind how it's taken, it all goes out the window. What we were doing, what we were feeling, what we were experiencing, what we were trying to capture.
And this stuff is important, it matters. This is how you start to feel better about photos. Is by listening to this, and practicing these skills. Remembering, reminding yourself.
of how a camera lens works. And that can, that can be as simple as, um, just saying, [00:21:00] oh, remember, like, the camera lens does all kinds of weird things. And I, I like my outfit. I felt good. Doesn't matter. Right? Like that quick. Um, remembering that what you're doing in the photo and the memory you were trying to capture has tremendous, incredible value and meaning.
Um, And, again, that we're not prioritizing what we look like over what it is to live and be and exist in a human body and the experiences that that gives us, um, which a photo often strips away and takes away from us. So, I think, I'm trying to think, there's um, there's, last thing, I do have one more thing.
It's got longer than I thought and I have to go eat breakfast. Um, the other [00:22:00] piece of this that I want to remind you, and this, this happens internally, it happens externally, in that we will look at an old photo of ourselves. This is what, I don't have my Invisalign in, I feel like I'm lisping. I'm like, worried this is changing my speech.
Anyway, sorry, there's a little insight into my brain. Um, we will look at an old photo of ourselves. when we know that we remember being unhappy with how we looked at the time on a diet, hating our bodies, and we will look at that old photo now and be like, oh my god, wow, I look great. That has literally happened to every single person.
So then I ask you, can you use that to hold space to think, is it possible that Maybe I actually look better in that photo than I think that I do now. If it's possible to look back at an old photo, is it possible that that same thing could be happening right now? A. And B, when you look at a photo of someone else, you may look at a photo of yourself and you see what you see because you are seeing that photo [00:23:00] through your lived experience.
Someone else looks at a photo of you and is like, Oh my God, you look great. What are you talking about? Because they're seeing it through their lived experience. Which is a reminder that we objectively see the same thing. Blue is blue, black is black, white is white, orange is orange. Unless you're colorblind.
But the meaning that we assign to what we see is different. Oh, blue is ugly. Oh, blue is my favorite color. Oh, that, that black top is gross. Oh, I love that black top. Based on our lived experience and our own opinions. And photos are the same, and I say that just to remind you that that's why I try to bring you back to what's actually happening here.
How does a camera work? What's the role that lighting plays? What are the objective facts of this situation? And what is our opinion that we are pushing onto it? And can we separate those [00:24:00] things, especially when we look at a photo? Um, and if one person can look at a photo and be like, oh my God, that looks amazing, you look amazing, and you look at the photo and you think you look disgusting, that right there says it's all opinion.
And opinions matter and they're part of obviously being alive. It just, it becomes a way to say like, okay, hold on. Can I be more objective about this? And the last thing, the actual last thing. And I've said this before, but it's a perfect way to, I think, close this out, is how many times have you taken a picture of like scenery on vacation, a sunset, flowers, the ocean, the beach, and shown that picture to someone to show them what a beautiful place you're at and said, the picture doesn't do it justice.
There's no way I could capture this with a photo. The same is true for you. You can't capture that beauty and that experience. Because of the [00:25:00] objective limitations of your iPhone that you, we don't know how to use probably in the best way possible, A, and B, just like what it does, the lenses. And also because the experience of being there is not something that can be totally captured.
So if you can say that about a sunset, a mountain, a flower, an ocean, a beach, why isn't that true for a photo taken of you? Right? It doesn't capture how amazing it was. This is not, this is not what it was really like. It was just the best documentation that I could get so I could remember it. So that's it.
It's got way longer. I didn't think this one was going to be this long. Thank you for listening. I hope this is helpful. Please let me know, um, if this is helpful for you. If it's not, what your thoughts are, what you've practiced and, um, always thank you for being here. Thank you for listening and I'll be back next week.