Article June 23, 2003 Issue

Toward a better body image

By Margaret Rogers

MY EARLIEST MEMORY OF HAVING A NEGATIVE BODY IMAGE is when I was seven or eight years old. At school we were learning about shapes. One day the teacher asked three girls, including me, to stand in front of the class. She pointed out that each of us had different shapes of lips. Carol's lips were thin, Candy's were medium, and mine were full, she observed matter of factly.

While she didn't intend to imply anything unfavorable about any of us, I was embarrassed. To me, full lips meant big lips. Although it had never occurred to me before, at that moment I wished I had medium lips like Candy. She was pretty and just the right shape in every way, I thought, while I was stocky. I didn't like that fact emphasized by my being singled out as having full lips.

However, I don't remember brooding over my looks at that young age. I was a happy kid, liked sports, and had plenty of friends. It wasn't until I was a teenager that I began trying to lose weight, a story told in a previous Sentinel (February 18, 2002). Suffice it to say that years of battling the bulge through willpower didn't have the desired effect. Finally, though, I did drop to a more normal weight for me as I began making more of an effort to grow spiritually. From my experience, I found that although changing one's physical appearance does give some temporary satisfaction, it's never the lasting contentment that spiritual growth offers.

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