5. How a Poor Body Image Keeps You at Your Lowest Standard

The Truth About Body Image and Ambitious Women

Have you ever missed out on social gatherings because of a wardrobe meltdown — feeling so bad about how you look, that you just canceled the whole thing and stayed at home? 

I have.

Other times I made it out the door, but I was so obsessed with how I looked that I couldn’t be present. For more than a decade, losing weight was one of my main goals in life. 

My happiness was more or less correlated with my weight. I was obsessed with finding the next perfect diet. 

I spent so much energy comparing myself to others, judging myself, and trying to shrink myself.

Looking back, I realize now all of this kept me operating at my lowest standard of what it means to be a human being. And I know I’m not the only one.

This episode is about body image and specifically how a negative body image destroys your self-worth — and how it keeps so many high-achieving women from actually living their lives. 

I’ll also share what it means to heal your body image, what’s really going on underneath all the body obsession, and what you can do to begin changing this from the inside out.

Body Image Isn’t Personal — It’s Systemic

If you listened to last week’s episode, you heard me talking about the perfectionist mindset and how it’s all about control — keeping you closed to opportunities and from reaching your potential, all while being disguised as excellence.

For many high-achieving women, the perfectionist mindset extends to the body. Having the perfect body and appearance is another metric you can achieve.

The simple definition of body image is how you imagine your body. It’s the mental picture and emotional relationship you have with your body. 

A healthy body image is where you accept and rejoice in the body as it is and as it looks right now — not just when it meets certain standards. 

It’s when you allow yourself to love and live in the body that you have.

A problematic body image is when your ideal of what you want the body to be leaves you in suffering and disembodiment. 

You have a certain image of how your body should look, and your body doesn’t live up to that — you judge it, which leads to suffering. 

You are in silent rejection of your own self.

We live in a time where our experience of the body is shockingly problematic. 

We are experiencing an epidemic of body hate. 

We live in a society that hates fat. Larger individuals experience weight hate, body shaming, and emotional and verbal bullying just about everywhere they go.

The question is, why? Why can’t we reverence the body for what it is?

The reason can be found in our societal structures. 

We live in a patriarchal, capitalist society. The system of capitalism and patriarchy worships masculine values — the mind, control, and productivity — because in this system, everything is about competition, profits, and economic growth. 

But it’s completely disconnected from the feminine, from the body, from emotions, and from soul.

There’s no room for the feminine in this linear, achievement-focused world where everything is measured by growth, competition, and individualism — where only a few win at the expense of others.

If you’re not among the winners, you’re made to feel like there’s something wrong with you.

In this worldview, fat has become the modern scapegoat—the thing you think you must conquer to be loved, successful, and worthy.

And interestingly enough, fat is biologically feminine. 

Women are designed to carry more body fat than men — in the hips, thighs, and belly. Fat is what makes you fertile. Fat plays a vital role in hormone production and sustaining pregnancy.

In many traditional cultures, a fuller figure has been associated with fertility, health, and abundance. All qualities deeply connected to the feminine. 

Fat is soft, expansive, receptive, also qualities associated with the feminine principle.

The masculine is about linearity, leanness, doing, direction. The feminine is about being, yielding, nurturing, and holding.

One could therefore say that our cultural fear of fat is a fear of the feminine. The attack on fat is an attack on the feminine.

When you demonize fat, especially in women, you are unconsciously rejecting the feminine within yourself, in others, and in society at large.

Our society and culture devalues bodies that don’t conform to narrow beauty ideals: fat bodies, but also aging bodies, disabled bodies, and non-white bodies. 

And if you’re constantly at war with your body, you’re easier to control, sell to, and distract.

So as you can see, the body hate and the weight hate is systemic. It’s not personal. It’s tied to capitalism, patriarchy, white supremacy, and ableism. This message is reinforced in media, movies, TV, social media, the internet, family, peers, religion.

So to bring this all together: A negative body image is not just something you came up with. You didn’t wake up one day hating your body.

Based on…

…An onslaught from media, a planet-wide history of body shaming, weight hate in the social environment, a disembodied culture that fears the feminine, and the constant messages you receive from just about everywhere that you are not good enough as you are — it makes perfect sense that you’d obsess about your body and want to change it.

Body Image Messages Disconnect You From Yourself

So what happens when you live inside this world of judgment and perfection?

You turn that violence inward. It becomes a program, and you start believing that your body is a problem to be fixed, not a sacred home to be inhabited.

You start seeing softness, aging, weight gain, and even hunger itself as a weakness or a failure.

If you’re a high-achiever with a strong perfectionist archetype, if you, early on in life, figured out that performing was a way to be safe and loved, it makes even more sense that you’d apply the same strategy to your body. 

You found something outside of you that you could control to earn love, safety, and acceptance.

A key theme here is disconnection.

When you’re disconnected from yourself and the Universe, Love, God (or whatever you wanna call the Higher Power) you somehow imagine you have to become that Higher Power —which is “perfect” — to feel safe, accepted, and loved.

The subconscious thinks:


“When things are perfect, when I look perfect, when my body is perfect, then I will truly have control and my life will be okay forever.”

I wanna share a moment from my own life where this belief crept back in.

One summer, I hired an online personal trainer. My intention was to build strength. And now that I think back, I probably wanted to lose some weight as well.

My personal trainer put me on a macro diet. She gave me calorie bandwidths and asked me to send her progress pictures every other week for measurement. 

I know her intentions were well meant — she just applied the formula she had been taught.

But this activated the perfectionist mindset in me, and I solely focused on the precision of hitting those macro and calorie goals. 

It was a slippery slope. 

Suddenly I was recording everything I ate in a stupid app. Measuring my protein on the gram. For a whole goddamn summer, I reduced food to chemical components — protein, fats, and carbohydrates.

This happened because I got disconnected from myself. And so I assumed that the formula my trainer gave me must be the answer.

This wasn’t just about macros or fitness. It was about falling back into the belief that my body had to be earned — that I had to micromanage every bite in order to be worthy of feeling good in my skin.

I’m sharing this to show you how subtle, and frankly, socially acceptable, the obsession can become.

Let’s be real. 

Self-body shaming, weight obsession, and chronic dieting are predictable responses to a disconnected world.

While it plays out on a personal level, understanding that it isn’t just personal, it is collective, is a massive part of healing.

Seeing that you’ve been brainwashed by culture is a big part of healing.

When you start to see the onslaught of messages that bombard you to dislike who you are, you can make the choice to remove yourself from that black hole.

You can choose to not believe in the messages. Know that the media is trying to control you, your habits, preferences, desires, and your mind.

And you can choose your dignity. You can choose to believe in your birthright to experience love and happiness exactly as you are.

You can choose to not partake in this in your personal life. Let’s say someone in your friend group starts sharing about how they’re skipping breakfast, intermittent fasting, cutting carbs, weighing food to stay within macros, or exercising to “earn” food.

You don’t have to engage in that conversation. 

You can unfollow people on social media who make you feel bad. 

You get to walk away. You do have a say.

The True Cost of Negative Body Image on Women’s Lives

I hope you start seeing how a negative body image keeps you unempowered, weak, and self-hating. It dramatically limits your potential.

My personal opinion is that it keeps you at your lowest standard as a human being.

Attacking yourself for having the “wrong” body is, in one way, a form of insanity. You have the body that you have. You wouldn’t be here on planet Earth without it.

If you do want to lose weight. If you do want to get healthier.  if you do want to shift your body in any way — attacking and hating yourself is not gonna get you there.

I’ve put so much energy and effort into comparing myself, judging myself, hating myself, and trying to figure out the next perfect diet. 

If I had channeled that energy somewhere else, God knows where I’d be.

Many of the clients that I’ve worked with have shared similar stories with me:

This doesn’t automatically heal with time. 

I’ve seen and talked to women of all ages judging their bodies: children, teenagers, adults, people in their thirties, forties, fifties, sixties, seventies — even nineties.

Many women take this obsession to the grave.

And we haven’t even talked about another layer: Aging.

Ageism – Another form of Body Shame

In a similar way as we fear fat, we have an extreme fear of aging. 

One of the most violent lies we are programmed with is that aging is a loss. A  loss of beauty, of value, of womanhood.

We see this everywhere. Women are complimented for not changing. For “bouncing back” after pregnancy. Even for having the perfectly round pregnant belly, but not showing any signs elsewhere in their body of actually growing a human being.

The cosmetic surgery and procedure market is expected to reach close to 200 billion USD in 2025, which says a lot.

But you’re not meant to be frozen in time.

Everything that is alive is in constant change — otherwise, it’s dead.

I just think, enough is enough.

We cannot keep on living like this. The pain and the cost of this is just unfathomable.

Let’s stop joining the systems that attack the feminine.

Embrace your feminine side. Ask yourself: What does being a woman mean to me?

Embodiment is Healing

Imagination shapes reality.

If you imagine a broken, shameful body — that’s the reality you’ll experience. 

If you start imagining a beautiful, whole, powerful body that you inhabit safely — that’s what you’ll begin to live.

Body image work isn’t about fixing how you look.

I know women of all shapes, sizes, ages, and colors who hate their bodies. Similarly, I know women of all shapes, sizes, and colors who love their bodies.

Just because you reach whatever ideal you’ve had in your mind… it’s not going to guarantee anything.

Body image work is a portal into deep self-acceptance and reconnection with your intuition and feminine energy.

Losing weight might give you a short high — but it’s a false positive. It doesn’t last.

You cannot hate yourself into loving your body. You cannot punish yourself into wholeness.

Negative body image exists when you’re disconnected from your body.

That’s why the fastest, and maybe only, way to transform your body image is embodiment.

Being in the body. Feeling it. Noticing its sensations. Letting the body speak to you.

When you’re disconnected from your body, it’s like driving a car with your eyes closed. You don’t see the speed, the road, the fuel. You’re checked out.

You think about the body rather than experience it. You do things to the body — drag it around, numb it, resist it, drug it, overfeed it, resent it, disregard it.

And when it comes to body image… you attack it.

When you’re embodied, it’s a million times easier to take care of yourself and your body — without having to rely on outside rules or systems.

You become attuned to your body’s needs: sleep, movement, nutrition. You notice your stress levels. You regulate your nervous system. You step out of fight-or-flight mode.

This is attractive. For real.

Embodiment is also about integrity. 

Doing things you enjoy doing. Speaking your truth. Enjoying your work. Contributing to your community in a meaningful way. Spending time with people who uplift you. Accepting yourself. Loving yourself.

All of this is attractive.

Stepping into the body can be difficult and confusing if you’ve spent years, even decades, outside of it.

A simple step is to just start paying attention.

It can be as small as tuning into one body part — like your hand — and noticing how it feels.

Or simply noticing your body when you walk. When you stretch. When you lift weights. Pay attention to how it feels — not just what it’s doing.

Another step in the healing process is to start doing the things you imagine you would do if you had your “perfect body.”

Who would you be? What would you do? What would you wear?

Now go do that. Today.

Healing body image isn’t a destination — it’s a journey.

Celebrate small victories:

All of this is respecting your body.

You’ll have days when you’re triggered, and that’s okay. And you’ll have days when you’re in love with yourself. That’s okay too.

What’s also important is to know that healing body image may involve letting go of the body you had once. 

Maybe you need to grieve that old identity — the one that was attached to a certain body type or appearance.

Take time to process those emotions.

The body is magical. It’s wise. It’s a teacher.

It holds its own intelligence — and so many undiscovered secrets of existence.

It’s really time to stop attacking it.

Be grateful you have a body. Be grateful you get to be here in your body.

You don’t need to wait until your body changes to start showing up for your life.

Because negative body image is a collective issue, healing alone isn’t easy — it’s almost impossible. We heal in community. We heal when we are seen by someone else.

This is why I’ve included body image work in my coaching program.

So if you’re a high-achieving woman who struggles with this and you’re serious about letting it go and stepping into your life fully — reach out to me and we can talk.

You can send me a DM on social media or visit the Work with Monika page to book a free discovery call.

That’s it for today. Thank you for reading and listening. 

As always:

Your worth is pre-designed. You don’t need to earn it.

Share
Share
Pin
TOPIC: Claim Your Self Worth