Body Image Beliefs:
Where They Come From, and How to Stop Hating Your Body
Nobody is born at war with their body – the beliefs that put you there were learned, which means they can be looked at, questioned and, slowly, set down.
Take the free Freedom Assessment →Most people who search for how to stop hating their body are not looking for another plan. They are tired – of the running commentary in the mirror, the clothes saved for “when”, the photographs avoided.
Chapter 8 of Who Told You That? The Beliefs That Keep You Small, and the Choices That Set You Free – “The Body You Live In” – starts somewhere different. It is not about weight loss, fitness, clean eating or body positivity as performance. As Mariyah Acka’a puts it, it is about “the story you tell about your body”.
A gentle note before you read on: if you live with an eating disorder, body dysmorphic disorder or another condition that affects how you see or care for your body, please explore this alongside a qualified professional. Nothing here is treatment, and you are welcome to skip anything that does not feel safe today.
What body image beliefs actually are
The book names one belief in particular: the body-as-obstacle belief. It is the sense that your body stands between you and the life you want, and that it must be fixed, managed, minimised or apologised for before you are allowed to fully show up.
Some forms are so embedded they pass as common sense: ‘My body is always working against me.’ ‘I cannot wear that / go there / do that until my body looks different.’ ‘I need to fix this before I deserve to be seen.’ The book calls each a limiting belief – and points out that every one has a traceable origin.
Where body image comes from
Mariyah describes body beliefs as the Inherited Script of Chapter 4, written onto the body: “Different domain. Same machinery.” The same forces that shaped your beliefs about your worth and your visibility also shaped your beliefs about your flesh.
The chapter draws on Thomas Cash’s research, which established that body image is not a perception of objective reality but a psychological construct, shaped by social learning, internalised messages and the culture a person grows up in. In the book’s words: “You were not born with a negative relationship with your body. You learned it. Which means it can be unlearned.”
The book traces four main sources:
- Family messages – comments made, often with love, that taught you a body is always in need of correction.
- Media and image saturation – filtered, often altered bodies presented as normal. Drawing on Sarah Grogan’s review and Anne Becker’s study in Fiji, the book notes that body dissatisfaction is not universal and seems to rise with exposure to narrow beauty ideals.
- Cultural and community standards – ideals that differ from place to place, and collide painfully for people living across more than one culture.
- Medical framing – appointments where the body is heard mainly as a set of numbers.
Mariyah’s own example is disarmingly ordinary. In the book she describes how, as a child, twenty-five looked ancient to her, and how she grew up fearing she would wake one morning transformed into the tired, faded women she remembered. Then she reached that age, and later middle age, and found that the fear had never been hers. It had been inherited – “passed down, repeated, reinforced – until it felt like truth.”
“The war with your body was not started by your body. It was started by a culture that profits from the war.”
How a body belief leaks into the rest of your life
The book is clear that this is not a private matter: “The body-as-obstacle belief does not stay in the body. It migrates.”
It shows up as the job you do not apply for, the event you skip, the intimacy you put off, the seat at the back, the voice you keep quiet.
There is a quieter cost too. Chapter 8 discusses Barbara Fredrickson and Tomi-Ann Roberts’ work on self-objectification – learning to watch your own body from the outside, as an observer would. The book reports that research has consistently linked this to greater depression and anxiety. It also describes research by Vivien Ainley and Manos Tsakiris, which found that people who habitually monitor their bodies from the outside score lower on interoceptive accuracy – the body’s internal report on itself.
In other words, the more you watch your body, the harder it can become to hear it. But, as the book puts it, the channel “does not close. It dims. And dimmed things can be turned back up.”
What helps: from enemy to ally
If you have been searching for body neutrality, you will recognise something close to it here. The book does not ask you to love your body on command. It asks for a slower shift – from body-as-enemy towards body-as-the-place-you-live – and it treats the body as an ally rather than a project.
In the book, Mariyah describes how menopause brought changes she had not been warned about, and how a call to her cousin Billie-Jean changed her relationship to them. What she was offered was not a fix but a different possibility: that her body and she were not in opposition. She is honest that she is still working on it. “But the direction of travel has changed. And the direction matters more than the distance.”
The chapter also makes room for grief. For anyone whose body carries loss – a child who did not come, a pregnancy that did not hold, a capacity that was taken – the book says plainly: “You are allowed to grieve what your body did not give you.” The work does not require the grief to be resolved first. And for anyone living in a body the world has labelled, Mariyah, writing about her sister, offers this: “the labels were always smaller than you.”
Practically, the book offers short somatic practices: a slow body scan, a grounding practice that names five things you can feel rather than see, and a moment of hands on chest and belly, thanking the body for keeping you. “This is not a cure. It is a direction.”
The companion workbook turns this into Tool 8 – The Body Reframe, a five-week protocol you can take at your own pace:
- The Honest Audit – the beliefs you hold about your body, where each came from, and what it has cost you.
- The Intelligence Inventory – what your body is actually doing – a message rather than a malfunction?
- Gratitude Without Performance – specific gratitude (“these legs have carried me through…”) instead of abstract affirmations.
- The Act of Alliance – giving your body one thing you have held back until it “earns” it: the outfit, the photograph, the event.
- The Yes Scan – noticing what yes and no feel like in your own body, as one voice among several when you decide.
The workbook is careful here, and so is this page: if you live with an eating disorder or body dysmorphic disorder, some prompts – such as listing negative beliefs or working with mirrors – may need to be adapted or skipped with a professional’s guidance. You can find support information on our safeguarding page.
Where to go deeper
- Read Chapter 8, “The Body You Live In”, in Who Told You That? – including the stories of women whose bodies carry grief.
- Work through Tool 8 – The Body Reframe in the Choose Forward workbook, one week at a time.
- Play The Matrix Game, a game for examining inherited “shoulds” – many of them written onto the body.
- Take the free Freedom Assessment to see which belief pattern is most active in your life.
- Read Chapter 1 free to start at the beginning.
Which belief is keeping you small?
The Freedom Assessment takes five minutes and shows which of four belief patterns is most active in your life – and where it is showing up most.
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