Behind the Plate with Heather Soman, RD

Tired of Hating Your Body? 3 Ways to Start Feeling at Home in It

• Heather Soman, RD • Episode 7

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In this episode, Heather unpacks why body image pain runs deep and how neutrality and respect offer a steadier path than chasing an ideal. We share research, personal stories, and three daily practices to help you feel at home in your body without making love the goal.

Heather Discusses:
• Defining body image as thoughts and feelings
• How media and diet culture shape beliefs
• Social media’s impact and key statistics
• Weight bias at work and links to worth
• Why changing the body rarely fixes the feeling
• Body neutrality versus body positivity
• Body respect as daily, practical care
• Three tools: name thoughts, value function, act with respect
• Diversifying feeds and disrupting comparison
• Nonlinear progress and sustainable support

Join my Empowered Eating Journey for tools and guidance to build a healthier relationship with food and your body. Find me on Instagram at @behindtheplatenutrition


Learn more at behindtheplate.ca

Grab the free Hunger & Fullness Cues Guide: behindtheplate.ca/hunger-fullness-cues

Explore The Empowered Eating Journey: behindtheplate.ca/empowered-eating-journey

SPEAKER_00:

Hi everyone and welcome back to the podcast. I'm Heather Soman, registered dietitian and certified intuitive eating counselor, and today we're talking about something that many of us struggle with, which is body image. If you've ever found yourself looking in the mirror, criticizing your body, or even feeling like you just have to change something to finally feel okay, this episode is for you. I want to dive into why we struggle so much with body image and what that looks like in real life, and three practical ways to start feeling at home in your body. Because trust me, I know from personal experience how hard it feels to have negative body image. I'm also going to share a little bit about body neutrality and body respect, which are two concepts that can really shift how we relate to ourselves and our bodies. I'm Heather Somman, a registered dietitian and certified intuitive eating counselor. This podcast is where we ditch food guilt, question diet culture, and learn how to nourish our brains and bodies in the way that nature intended. So let's get into it. Alright, let me quickly define what body image actually is, because every now and again I run into someone who has the misconception that body image is just the way the body looks, which I think makes sense because when we think of the words body image, we think about the way our body looks. But body image is actually about the thoughts and feelings that we have about our body. It's actually less about how our body looks and more about the way we're perceiving our body. If you grew up like me in the late 90s and early 2000s, you might remember what our TV shows, magazines, and yes, we read magazines, music videos, and movies were like. Yeah, they have this nostalgic allure to them. But when I think about how we tended to see white, cis, f slim characters, those were usually the main characters. You didn't really see main characters in different body sizes or race or of different sexualities, etc., which we know is problematic for many reasons. We had things like Jenny Craig, America's Next Top Model, Weight Watchers, 100 Calorie Snack Packs, Slim Fast, the Biggest Loser, P90X infomercials comes to mind for me, Oprah with her constant different diet crazes, and I'm sure if you're of the same generation as me, you could probably name quite a few more. And this isn't just for millennials, this is also for generations before us and generations after us. I mean, we all have our body image framed from different perspectives, but what I think is really important is to think about the way in which media and diet culture sort of shaped the way that we believe bodies need to be. I even think about the OG Mean Girls, and that's something I think about around this time of year, around Halloween, which is when the part in Mean Girls when Regina was sabotaged for gaining weight, which was portrayed as like the worst possible thing that could happen to her, or the rhetoric around the fat Monica character in Friends. I'm not a huge fan of Friends myself, but I have seen episodes where they refer to Monica in a larger body. And if you've seen it, you know what I'm talking about. She's perceived as less desirable, she's almost kind of clumsy, she's almost this kind of like other character instead of like a more main character that she actually is in the show, all because she's in a larger body. Now, bring on the world of social media, which I think we can all understand has changed everything, especially with body image. I mean, the more time we spend online and watching TV, the more we get disconnected with reality. And the reality is that people exist in a variety of body shapes and sizes. For whatever reason, we seem to be able to accept that people have different shoe size, different shoe sizes or eye color or hair texture, and yet for whatever reason the world that we live in makes us believe that there's one size that's right for us, which ultimately is smaller. I want to share some statistics here because this is so prevalent, and of course, I see this in a lot in my work as a dietitian. But just so you know you're not alone, this these are some interesting statistics. Between 69 and 84% of women experience body dissatisfaction and want to weigh less. This is um retrieved 2025, so this is relatively newer research. Um, and the 84%, I think, is closer to where we are more lately, especially ever since the pandemic and the way social media has been. Between 10 and 30% of men, they also experience body dissatisfaction and want to be more muscular. 46% of young adults aged 18 to 24 report negative effects on their well-being and from body image distress, which was reported in 2022. 40% of teenagers said that images on social media cause them to worry about their body image. And this is um research done in 2025 from the Mental Health Foundation. And I mean, those are quite staggering research results. If you don't have teenagers in your life or interact with teenagers very much, I can tell you as a professional who works with teenagers that I think that that statistic, that 40%, is probably a lot higher. And I think that's just because of the world that they've grown up in and the way in which the pandemic shaped their understanding of reality and the way social media influences them. And I mean, when we think about it, haven't we always sort of seen thinner bodies as more desirable? There's many different times in history when we look at when that has been desirable. And I think there's data going back to as early as like the 1920s, although I'm sure it was something apparent even before that. And then think about how body image shows up in things like our relationships, like romantic relationships, for example. How many people with negative body image believe that they're not desirable because of how they look? It goes beyond self-esteem. It can impact behavior and can cause some people to isolate themselves or not take up certain opportunities that may be presented, which may lead you to think about another place where body image shows up and impacts us, which could be in the workplace. So, for example, from a confidence standpoint, many people with more quote-unquote socially acceptable body sizes are usually the ones who are promoted or brought into more leadership roles. And this is something that is called weight bias and weight stigma, which is unfortunately an extremely prevalent type of discrimination found in our society. Maybe one day I'll do a full episode on weight bias and what it means. But basically, when a workplace treats our bodies as a marker of competence, it reinforces the idea that our worth is tied to our appearance and not our performance or our character. I mean, I can speak to this strongly as a registered dietitian who doesn't quite fit into like a standard thin ideal, though I will say I don't live in sort of a plus size or larger size body. I know what it feels like to be in a profession where my body is sort of looked at as almost my business card, right? But I digress. Body image, again, is our thoughts and feelings about our body, which can be further perpetuated by the systematic inequities that we face through things like diet culture, weight stigma, the media we consume, the places we work, the families that we're in, the friends we associate ourselves, so on and so forth. And it makes sense when you think about it that when we feel negative emotions, especially about our bodies, our natural instinct is to fix it. As humans, we don't like feeling uncomfortable. We don't like feeling negative emotions, we want solutions. So often our first thought is to change the body itself. And that might mean someone pursuing weight loss, doing a restrictive diet, doing intense exercise, or other quick fixes because they think that the problem lives within their body. But here's the thing that I've seen over the last six years, especially working with clients with eating disorders, is that it never seems to be enough. Even if someone loses weight or hits a specific weight goal, that place that they thought they would be satisfied at, that body, that achievement, whatever, they thought they would finally feel happy. But again, that feeling is likely fleeting. There's always something else to critique, another part of the body that feels wrong, another comparison to make, another I should. It's exhausting. And again, it's not about the body itself. Body dissatisfaction, by the way, isn't a failure of willpower or commitment. It's often the way we've been taught to see our bodies in a culture that constantly tells us that our worth is tied to our appearance. And the harder we chase change as the solution, the more trapped we feel. Now, this is where the concepts of body neutrality and body respect come in. Body neutrality is about shifting the focus away from loving or hating our body or pursuing this place of body positivity because sometimes loving your body just does not feel like a realistic goal, especially when you're really struggling with your body image. Instead, it's about finding peace with your body and noticing it for what it allows you to do and treating it with fairness and respect. Which leads me to my next point, which is body respect. And that kind of takes things a little bit further when it comes to body neutrality. It's about listening to your body, honoring its needs, and making choices that support its health and your well-being without trying to force it into some mold or punishing it if it just exists as is. So again, body neutrality is really not necessarily feeling a negative or a positive about our bodies. It's kind of finding this place in the middle where it's like, I don't love my body per se, but I also don't hate it. And I can kind of just accept my body as being this vessel that brings me through this life on earth. That's a place that I have come to with my body at least. I mean, I remember when I was a lot younger, I always thought that being smaller or thinner or fitter would make me happy in my body. And no matter what I did, I never felt fully happy until I started to just accept my body for what it is. I mean, I instead of trying to make my legs smaller, I just ended up saying, you know what, they are what they are, and they are strong. And that acceptance and that understanding of my body is what it is, and just sort of allowing it to just exist and not feeling this pressure to necessarily need to love it, was sort of freeing for me, in all honesty. I want to share another example. For one of my clients, um, she used to wake up and immediately feel shame about her body before even leaving her bedroom, let alone when she would step on the scale. And then over time, we worked on noticing the things that her body does for her, like her strength, it, you know, feeling some type of gratitude for having legs that walk and arms that move, and having the energy to get through the day, or having the mobility to do the things that she needed to do, and practicing these small little actions of both respect and gratitude. She was somebody who would restrict herself because she didn't like her body, and then eventually she started to eat when she was hungry and moving in ways that didn't feel punishing for her, they felt more freeing for her. She didn't necessarily love every inch of her body, but she started to feel less at war with it. And that for her was transformative because she wasn't stuck in this negative thought loop about her body. She didn't feel like she hated her body anymore. And instead of it being about hate, it just became about acceptance and using her mind and her energy for other things, like respecting her body and kind of getting on with her day and focusing on other things that were more important, like her relationships and her work. All right, I've talked about a lot of theory here, and I'm sure you're at a point where you're like, okay, well, how do I make this shift? How do I start feeling at home in my body? And I want to share three main tips for you, and I might share a few others after. The first one, and I know this sounds kind of lame and therapy-like, but it's to notice and name your thoughts. So start paying attention to that negative self-talk about your body. Just noticing it is really powerful. I mean, for a lot of us, we have sort of this dialogue that happens when we look in the mirror. I know when I was trapped in a negative body image cycle, I would constantly look at the same parts of my body and critique them using the same words to describe those parts of my body. And it was a really tough cycle to break until I started noticing what that dialogue sounded like and what feelings that brought about. So instead of immediately trying to fix my body, I would sort of pause and say, there's that critical dialogue again, there's that critical voice, and remind myself that, hey, it's normal to have these thoughts because of the world that I grow up, grew up in and live in. And these thoughts don't have to control me. They don't have to lead the way in which I'm gonna show up in the world that day. The next way to start feeling at home in your body is to focus on function over form. So shifting your attention to what your body can do rather than how it looks. Can it carry groceries, dance, go for a walk, hug someone you love? Celebrating these functions of your body helps your mind and body work together rather than against one another. For those who are science-minded like myself, learning more about the human body can actually really help when you're trying to learn to appreciate it more. I'm planning to do some Instagram posts about this to just share some really fun facts about the human body in case this helps, it might be something worth uh thinking about. Another perspective that I have on this is if you have ever been injured or sick and it has done something to your body where you can't do what you love. I think about, for example, for myself, I have a chronic injury, which is ankle sprains. I've sprained my ankle four times, and I now have a chronic pain issue in that ankle. And every time I've been on crutches and been in a cast, I am reminded of how much my legs, my feet, my ankle does for me. So every time I'm able to walk again and run and do all the things I want to do, I am so, so grateful. And so if you've been through something like that, you may have inadvertently built a little bit more appreciation for your body, but just thinking about it in that kind of way and showing some type of gratitude for its function can be really, really helpful. Okay, the third one is practicing small acts of body respect. So we talked about what body respect is as a concept, and now I want to talk about what it actually looks like to do that. So this could be something as simple as choosing clothes that feel comfortable for you. For example, if you know you're gonna be sitting all day at a desk, does it make sense and does it feel respectful to your body to wear the tight-fitting high-waisted pants? I mean, you're gonna sit down all day and you're just gonna feel that that restriction of those pants. So might be worth choosing something that's a little bit more comfortable that your body can feel a little bit more able to breathe in. It could also be moving in a way that feels good and not necessarily in a way of punishing your body. So a lot of people don't feel like their exercise is enough or valid if it's not something of high intensity and they're not dripping in sweat after. But maybe it's about just, you know, going for a walk or doing something a little bit lighter because you're feeling really tired today. That's a way of respecting your body. And also nourishing your body with foods that you enjoy that also satisfy hunger. So I'm talking about, you know, when we're hungry eating, that's one major important thing. Again, as we've discussed, sometimes when we're feeling negative about our body, we may want to restrict our food intake because we're hoping to change it. One way of respecting your body is to have something when it's sending you hunger cues. It's just like if you have to go to the bathroom, right? If you have to pee and you ignore it, what happens? It just gets dronker, right? Eventually you're gonna have to pee. It's the same kind of thing when it comes to eating. So when we're feeling those cues, it's important to respond to those cues. And many people are able to grasp the idea and accept that, okay, maybe I don't need to love my body, but at least I can accept it. That might be a place for you to start. Start with one small act a day. You don't have to overhaul your whole relationship with your body overnight. This takes a long time, and I can say that from my own personal experience. I think my transformative body image journey was, oh my gosh, like I started wanting it to be more neutral maybe six or seven years ago, and I'm still going. Like, there's still times that I don't feel great about myself. If you follow me on Instagram, you would have seen me talk about um how my wedding recently impacted my body image and how that kind of brought me back to a place I didn't even know still existed. All this to say that our body image can change over time because it's thoughts and feelings. And thoughts and feelings, as you may know, come and go. They don't always stay the same. But what we can control here is our behavior and how we act on those thoughts and feelings. Another thing that might be helpful here, as I sort of mentioned earlier, was social media. So another thing you might want to consider is doing a social media audit. If your algorithm on all platforms is just showing you the same body type all the time, it might be worth doing an audit because when you walk out into the real world, let's say you're in a busy place, like a mall, I don't know, whatever it is, you're in the real world, you see that there are people of different heights, different body shapes and sizes and and whatnot. So you want your algorithm, your social media feeds to reflect that. So again, if that's what you're constantly consuming, and you're somebody who maybe doesn't go out into the world that much because you work hybrid or you work from home or whatever it is, and you don't get to encounter other bodies that often, consider what you're consuming online. And then another point to that is when you're comparing yourself to other people, which a lot of people with negative body image do, who are you comparing yourself to? Are you only comparing yourself to people in smaller bodies than yourself, more quote unquote ideal, whatever that means to you, bodies to yourself? Why are you not comparing yourself to other bodies that you might see as less desirable? And just getting curious about that can be a really helpful and transformative exercise. I want to again emphasize that this work is not linear. Some days you might feel at peace with your body, and some days it might be tough, and that's normal, and that's okay. For my work with my clients and from my own journey, I've seen that the goal isn't this perfect body positivity, body love. It's about reducing that constant inner war. It's about cultivating respect and learning to live fully in your body, even with its imperfections and struggles. If you're ready to dive deeper into some of these ideas, I have a ton of resources for you. You can join my empowered eating journey for tools and guidance to build a healthier relationship with food and your body. I also share practical tips, personal reflections, and resources through my email list and on Instagram and TikTok. You can find me on Instagram at Behind the Plate Nutrition so that you can stay supported between these podcast episodes. Links to these are in the show notes. I'd love for you to check them out. And remember, you don't have to love your body perfectly, but you can feel at home in it and start taking steps towards body respect and peace today. Thank you so much for listening. I will see you in the next episode.