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Alyssa Luck

Alyssa Luck

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What if you can’t love your body?

Alyssa Luck · Sep 2, 2015 · 1 Comment

Body image and self-love are hot topics in the blogosphere these days, and I don’t know how I feel about it.

Before I come off as the worst kind of person, let me just say that I’m thrilled people are learning to not be so hard on themselves for not being “perfect,” and for recognizing the beautiful things about themselves. I know I have my fair share of insecurities, and often I could do with a healthy dose of self-love.

But with almost every article I read in the continuously evolving collection of body image media, I’m left feeling not quite satisfied. Like the author has almost spoken to me, but was really speaking to a spot on the wall about a foot to the left.

First there was “curvy is the new skinny.” When this first became a thing, I was actually still pretty underweight thanks to my rocky relationship with my colon (we have since divorced due to irreconcilable differences), and along with many other skinny girls, felt a little alienated. Skinny-shaming is no more okay than fat-shaming is, and luckily it didn’t take too long for most people to realize that.

Then it was “strong is the new skinny.” A step in the right direction, perhaps, but what about people who can’t be strong? There are lots of us; people who, because of a chronic disease or other circumstance, simply can’t hit the squat rack to obtain the much-celebrated strong thighs and butt. I can personally attest to the fact that it’s a major bummer not being strong, and a colossal bummer knowing that, at this point in your life, you can do absolutely nothing about it.

But now, the focus has shifted to a more gentle kind of self-love. Loving yourself where you are, accepting your imperfections, and even seeing them as beautiful. I’m all for the take-no-prisoners war on body hate; absolutely no one benefits from the constant internal monologue of comparisons and self-directed meanness that goes on in a lot of peoples’ heads. Gina from So, Let’s Hang Out wrote a beautiful piece about this recently.

But I haven’t been able to get completely on board with the “love your imperfections, everyone is beautiful” way of thinking, and I think a lot of other people haven’t either. Yes, beauty is in the eye of the beholder, but there is a such thing as objective physical attractiveness, and not everyone has it in equal measure. I think it’s counterproductive to try and convince everyone of their own beauty, because a) it probably won’t work, and b) it keeps the focus on physical appearance, which is what got us in this mess in the first place.

Some articles I’ve read have taken a similar stance. This one on “body neutrality” offers an interesting and helpful perspective, where “body neutrality” essentially means putting your body on the back burner and keeping it there. Not shaming it, not celebrating it; just living in it. I really love this concept, and if you can hack it, I think body neutrality is a really good place to be.

But the thing is, it’s hard to not think about your body. Mirrors still exist, and our collective societal hang-up on appearance means we’re constantly inundated with advertisements, articles, and conversations that bring our attention back to our bodies. And if we can’t immediately reach that place of “body neutrality,” and we can’t quite replace our body negativity with body love yet, we have to replace it with something else. I propose we replace it with gratitude.

I’m not perfect. And I’m not at the point yet where I can consistently love my imperfections and see myself as beautiful in spite of them, much less because of them. But when I find myself getting hung up on how much I hate something about my body, I can mentally shake myself and say something like “Alyssa, you can walk. And see.” And then I feel pretty stupid for worrying about my stomach pudge or face shape or lack of a large intestine, because not everyone is so lucky.

You know that feeling you get when you hear stories about people born with serious genetic defects, or people who get in terrible accidents and go from being in their physical prime to being completely paralyzed? That feeling of perspective and sympathy and gratitude? I think that’s a feeling we should cultivate on a daily basis. You don’t have to love your body, but you can be so darn thankful that you have functioning arms and hands that thinking about your unwanted arm flab feels ridiculous. So you stop thinking about it.

Everyone has different struggles with their body, but everyone should be able to find something, even several somethings, that they’re grateful for. I’ll get you started by listing some awesome things that my body can do.

  1. See
  2. Hear
  3. Eat
  4. Walk
  5. Pet my cat
  6. Cook delicious food
  7. Play guitar (mediocre-ly)
  8. Play piano (a bit more competently)
  9. Breathe
  10. Laugh
  11. Hike
  12. My liver works pretty well, as far as I know
  13. I think my spleen does too (Spleen should be a verb. My body can spleen.)
  14. Think (how crazy is it that we can think? And then think about the fact that we can think??)
  15. Dance
  16. Type on my computer
  17. Read things
  18. Pick things up and put them down
  19. Swim
  20. Sunbathe

I could go on. The point is, the vast majority of us who get all bent out of shape over how we look still have bodies that are decently intact and function somewhat normally. Some people aren’t so lucky.

It’s okay to want to try to get healthier and look better. That’s natural. What’s not okay is hating your body as it is now. Unfortunately, loving your body is easier said than done.

So the next time you start obsessing over the way your legs look in shorts or the way wrinkles have started appearing on your face, don’t try to convince yourself to love your legs and your wrinkles. Instead, consider the fact that you have working legs, and also probably the correct number of chromosomes. You might find that you suddenly feel more positive towards your body, more prepared to treat it well, and maybe even happier about your life in general. Perspective is a powerful thing.

 

 

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  1. Laura says

    September 2, 2015 at 4:23 pm

    I was just having this conversation the other day! Not everyone is beautiful, and it’s OKAY. Being beautiful is only one thing our bodies are capable of, and there are many other traits that make us amazing human beings that have nothing to do with our appearance or our body’s function.

    Reply

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Hi! I’m Alyssa. I like thunderstorms and cats, hate wearing shoes, and enjoy devising extensive research projects for myself in my free time. This is me in Bali with a monkey on my shoulder. And this is my blog, where I muse about health-related topics and document my relentless self-guinea pigging. If you want to know more about me, click here!

alyssa.luck

alyssa.luck
Photo dump from the last year. Thanks to everyone Photo dump from the last year. Thanks to everyone who made 28 the best yet - excited for 29🥰

(PS. In case anyone wants to know what it’s like in my head, I was going to write something like “year 28” or “my 28th year” but then I realized that the year between your 28th and 29th birthdays is not your 28th year of life, it’s your 29th year. I am turning 29 because I have been alive for 29 years. So then I had a whole thing about how to word it without being inaccurate and ended up going with what you see above which is vague and weird but the point is it was a good year and I love all the people in my life dearly)
Biology of Belief (2005) was written by Bruce Lipt Biology of Belief (2005) was written by Bruce Lipton, who earned a PhD in developmental biology in 1971 and was an anatomy professor and academic researcher in the 70s and 80s. Despite the book's presentation and Lipton's background, this is not a science book. It is an exposition of an ideology, supported by haphazard and poorly contextualized nuggets of evidence, rhetorical leaps, and a mind-boggling overuse of analogies. 

The book largely failed to deliver on its promised content. What it does is argue for the primacy of the environment over DNA in controlling life; propose that the cell membrane rather than the nucleus is the "brain" of the cell; invoke quantum physics to explain why modern medicine fails; explain that our behavior is largely controlled by our subconscious mind; inform parents that they therefore have a great deal of control over the destiny of their children; and conclude that humans must become nonviolent protectors of the environment and of humanity because Everything Is Connected.

It’s not that these points aren’t relevant to the topic at hand - they are. But they were not connected in a coherent way that would explain how “belief” actually works (like…biologically), and the treatment of scientific concepts throughout was careless, or perhaps disingenuous.

I think he's correct about many things, some of them being common knowledge. For instance, the "new" science of epigenetics is now old news, as is the critical role of parenting and early environment in shaping a child’s future. But however important these and attendant concepts may be, the book did not do a good job explaining, supporting, or connecting them. 

As far as practical guidance, he refers the reader to a list of resources on his website, which is fine, but I expected some scientific insight into how/why those modalities work. None was given. 

On the plus side, the book was quite thought-provoking, and I came away with loads of references and topics to follow up on. My favorite line? "There cannot be exceptions to a theory; exceptions simply mean that a theory is not fully correct."
Friedrich Nietzsche, The Gay Science (section 382) Friedrich Nietzsche, The Gay Science (section 382), as quoted in the introduction to Thus Spoke Zarathustra because I like the translation better.
This paper totally changed the way I think about e This paper totally changed the way I think about early nervous system development and the relationship between physiology and sociality. 

The authors propose that newborn babies are not inherently social, and have just one goal in life: physiological homeostasis. I.e. staying alive. This means nutrients, warmth, and regulation of breath and heart rate, i.e. autonomic arousal (it’s well-accepted that newborns sync their breathing and heart rate with caregivers through skin to skin contact). 

All these things are traditionally provided by a loving caregiver. So what the baby experiences during the first weeks of life, over and over, is a shift from physiological perturbation to homeostasis (a highly rewarding event inherently) REPEATEDLY PAIRED with things like the sound of a caregiver’s voice and seeing their face. Thus, over time, the face/voice stimuli become rewarding as well. 

The authors argue that THIS is the beginning of humans’ wiring for sociality, and may explain why loving social interactions can have such a profound regulating effect on physiology throughout life: because the brain was trained for it at an early age. 

This framework holds all kinds of fascinating implications for what happens if that initial “training” isn’t so ideal. What if the return to nutritional homeostasis via feeding is paired with negative expressions and vocalizations rather than loving ones, perhaps as could occur with PPD? What happens if the caregiver has poor autonomic regulation, such that social stimuli become paired with cardiorespiratory overexcitement in the baby? Could that have potential for influencing later introversion vs extroversion? (Because if social interaction is paired with autonomic overexcitement, that could lead to social interaction literally being more energetically draining, which is what introverts experience. Thoughts?)

For my energy metabolism enthusiasts: Table 1 in the paper draws a link between metabolic rate and sociality across species. Swipe for a screenshot. 

Anyway, check out the paper! It’s free, just google “growing a social brain pdf.”
I’ll be under general anesthesia in a couple day I’ll be under general anesthesia in a couple days to have two tooth implants placed, and I think I’ll take the opportunity to have a little heart-to-heart with my subconscious mind. A bit of medically-assisted self-hypnosis, if you will. 

I randomly stumbled upon these papers a couple months ago - an RCT showing reduced post-op pain in patients who listened to recorded positive messages while under general anesthesia, plus a post-hoc analysis of the same data that found reduced post-op nausea and vomiting in a subset of high-risk patients. 

The full review paper from the first slide is unfortunately in German, but it has long been recognized that even when unconscious, the patient is listening (for better or for worse). 

It boggles my mind that it isn’t standard of care to have patients listen to recordings like this while under sedation, considering that almost nothing could be easier, safer, or cheaper, and we have at least some evidence of significant efficacy. I mean c’mon, what more could you want from an intervention? 

(Yeah, I know. Profit. If anyone still thinks that our medical system operates with patient well-being as the foremost goal, you’re deluding yourself.)

“There should be a fundamental change in the way patients are treated in the operating room and intensive care unit, and background noise and careless conversations should be eliminated.”

“Perhaps it is now time to finally heed this call and to use communication with unconscious patients that goes beyond the most necessary announcement of interventions and is therapeutically effective through positive suggestions. When in doubt, assume that the patient is listening.”
If you've seen "vagus nerve exercises" that have y If you've seen "vagus nerve exercises" that have you moving your eyes or tilting your head, you've probably encountered the work of Stanley Rosenberg. The exercises he created and introduced in his 2017 book now appear in instructional videos all over the internet. 
 
The book itself has much to recommend it: it's accessible, it's practical, it's inspiring. But it has one major flaw: the solid practical and informational content regarding the cranial nerves is framed in terms of the scientifically dubious polyvagal theory. 
 
I particularly enjoyed the book as an introduction to the therapeutic arena of bodywork, of which Rosenberg is a skilled practitioner. His book is full of case reports that demonstrate how immensely powerful extremely subtle movements and physical manipulations can be. These do need to be kept in perspective: it's a small sample size of the most remarkable cases, and the results were achieved within the supportive clinical environment of a skilled practitioner. You can tell from his descriptions how refined his technique is. But nevertheless, it was a paradigm-shifting read for me, and the exercises give you something concrete to play around with. 
 
The book also brought the cranial nerves and the concept of “social engagement” to the fore as arbiters of health. Rosenberg has a solid background in cranial nerve anatomy and shares many interesting tidbits and considerations that you don’t typically hear; for instance, the potential impact of dental and orthodontic work on cranial nerve function.
 
So, is it worth reading? If any of the above piques your interest, go for it! Just read my post on polyvagal theory first – you can use the book to practice separating the wheat (solid informational content) from the chaff (pseudoscientific framing). If nothing else, the book is a nice reminder that genuine healers who get lasting results for their patients do exist.

But if you just want to try the exercises, you can easily find them all on YouTube. 

“You learn techniques to understand principles. When you understand the principles, you will create your own techniques.” -Stanley Rosenberg
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