THE ARTICLE
The age at which girls express dissatisfaction with how their bodies look is getting younger and younger. Even among men, poor body image is a growing problem. As many as 60 percent of adults say they don’t like the way their bodies look.
Exercise is one way of changing how your body looks, and many choose to exercise for that reason. However, new research shows that women who focus on the health benefits of exercise enjoyed themselves more and were more likely to repeat the activity, than women who focus on changing their appearance as the main goal of exercise. The research, which appears in a recent issue of the journal Psychology of Sport and Exercise, noted the importance of the instructor’s approach: if the instructor motivated the participants by emphasising how good they would look, the participants felt worse about themselves and about the class than in classes where the instructor emphasised the health benefits.
Women are bombarded with ultra-thin, "Photoshopped" images of women as the social and cultural “ideal”. We spend billions of dollars on products that will supposedly change body size, shape, and appearance, and reverse the aging process. In fact, very few women are physically or genetically capable of reaching the cultural ideal, and if they were to reach it, their bodies would be in a very unhealthy state. They would have too low of a level of body fat for proper functioning, which could lead to the cessation of menstrual cycles, in addition to a host of additional problems. These days, even the models themselves have their images modified to represent impossible beauty. Additional pressures can come from the people around us. Family and friends can influence your body image with positive and negative comments, and even a doctor’s advice can be misinterpreted and affect our body image.
So how do we get the most out of our exercise program without becoming obsessed with simply looking better? Remember that the health benefits of exercise can last a lifetime, and choose to exercise regularly in an enjoyable way. Research has shown that the simple act of exercising, whether you are fit or not, improves how you feel about how you look. The interesting study, from the University of Florida, showed that even those who don’t achieve their fitness goals (such as losing fat, gaining strength, or boosting cardiovascular fitness) feel just as good about their bodies as people who do achieve their goals. The important thing was simply that they got moving.
"You would think that if you become more fit that you would experience greater improvements in terms of body image, but that's not what we found,” says Heather Hausenblas, a UF exercise psychologist. "It may be that the requirements to receive the psychological benefits of exercise, including those relating to body image, differ substantially from the physical benefits."
Other results of the study showed that women’s body image benefits slightly more than men’s from exercise. "We believed the gap would be much bigger, but what could be coming into play is the rise of body image issues among men," Hausenblas said. "We're seeing more media portrayals of the ideal physique for men rather than the overriding emphasis on women we did in the past."
Another reason to focus on the health aspects of exercise is that the more a person is dissatisfied with their body image, the less likely they are to exercise. Everyone benefits from exercise in terms of their mental and physical health, and women in particular benefit from focusing less on physical appearance and more on living healthy. The more we can counteract the daily dose of impossible beauty coming from outside ourselves, the more we can replace it with a feeling of comfort in our bodies and in our minds.
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