Why a Positive Body Image is the missing piece to Healthy Eating in Perimenopause

As women transition through perimenopause, navigating hormonal and weight changes, energy dips, clothes fitting differently, mood swings, memory blips —it’s easy to feel like your body is no longer your own.

Never mind the pressure put on women to look 25.

While many perimenopausal women, like you, are busy searching the internet for the secret weight loss hack, trying all sorts of supplements and still not getting the outcome they want- to make healthier food choices and be more confident in your body.

Why?

Here’s a powerful truth: improving your body image will help you to eat better. If you’re struggling to be consistent, and you’ve tried all the diets, improving your body image could be the missing piece.

How so?

Research shows that poor body image has been consistently related to unhelpful eating behaviours that are likely to undermine successful weight management [1].

Many perimenopausal women don’t like what they see in the mirror, and when we don’t like how we look, we are more likely to feel pressure to diet and rigidly control our eating behaviours. While we think dieting is the solution to our problem, instead it leads to more uncontrolled and binge eating [2].

This increase in emotional eating often lead to feelings of guilt, shame and unhelpful self-criticism, further putting us at risk of repeating the yo-yo dieting cycle and feeing like a failure.

When you embrace a positive body image, your relationship with food shifts from shame-based to supportive.

Cool, but I still want to lose weight

You might still be feeling a bit skeptical about how a positive body image can help you. Like many of my clients you may have assumed that if you want to change how you look, you can’t also try and improve your body image.

That’s totally understandable, and you don’t have to totally give up your desire to look different.

But it’s important to know that if you’re currently stuck in the binge-restrict cycle, focusing only on a physique change is going to bring you further away from your goal of improving your eating behaviours.

You can still have the goal of changing your body composition, but the motivation or reason behind why you are doing it may need to change so you are more successful.

Why?

Because external sources such as not liking how you look is not the biggest motivator of healthier eating. It won’t lead to long-term sustainable change. It’s a low quality motivator, often driven by “quick fix” diets.

When you place a high value or investment in how you look, this is associated with negative moods, which could result in increased emotional eating, disinhibition and perceived hunger, and a more rigid approach to eating [3].

When developing a positive body image, one of the key attributes is to broaden how you view your self worth and reduce the importance that you place on how you look.

This doesn’t mean you will stop caring about how you look, you will still place some importance on this, however it won’t be the most important thing to you.

In a 12 month behavioural weight management program targeting eating behaviours and body image, researchers found that the change in body image investment was more strongly related to the changes in eating behaviour [4].

This means that by reducing the importance of your body in your life, you will develop better regulation of your eating behaviours.

When we are motivated to eat well due to an internal desire to treat ourselves well and support our body’s needs, we are more likely to be successful.

Interested in learning more?

If you are sick of trying quick fix diets that don’t work that make you feel like a failure and are interested in learning more about body image and seeing results that last, click on the link below to sign up to my waitlist for my 1:1 coaching

References

[1] Pelletier LG, Dion SC: An examination of general and specific motivational mechanisms for the relations between body dissatisfaction and eating behaviors. Journal of Social and Clinical Psychology 2007, 26:303-333.

[2] Stice E: Risk and maintenance factors for eating pathology: a meta-analytic review. Psychol Bull 2002, 128:825-848.

[3] Cash TF: Cognitive-Behavioral Perspectives on Body Image. In Body image: A handbook of theory, research, and clinical practice. Edited by: Cash TF, Pruzinsky T. New York: Guilford Press; 2002:38-46.

[4] Carraça, Eliana & Nunes Silva, Marlene & Markland, David & Vieira, Paulo & Minderico, Cláudia & Sardinha, Luis & Teixeira, Pedro. (2011). Body image change and improved eating self-regulation in a weight management intervention in women. The international journal of behavioural nutrition and physical activity. 8. 75. 10.1186/1479-5868-8-75.