How to Handle Body Comparison

An eating disorder brain zeros in on everything to do with food, body, and weight. It makes it seem super important. It will compare your body to others, your food to that person's food, your exercise to their exercise. It's always comparing and calculating and obsessing. Social media fuels this comparison dumpster fire, celebrity gossip, fashion and fitness magazines. I had to back away from all of that. Then, in every day life, if I caught myself comparing, I would notice it and deliberately stop. The comparison habit is no different from calorie counting or body checking. Your brain loops it constantly because you've taught it that it's very important. The way to teach it that it's no longer important is to stop cold or do the opposite over and over again. So, just like with counting calories, or wanting to jump on the scale, or trying to decide what I'll eat based on what others are eating, I had to first notice I was doing it, and then decide not to. I recognized that it's only a useless habit of my diet mind, one that can be changed. I never concern myself with calories anymore, and I'm not threatened or triggered by people who are smaller or leaner. That took time and a lot of repetition. There's a big breakthrough up front when you begin to see those thought patterns and behaviors as a kind of annoying fake news and not reality, but they still keep popping up all over the place. It takes a lot of not engaging with them for your brain to quit offering them as default thoughts, but they can weaken pretty quickly and dramatically. You don't have to stop the thoughts from happening, you only have to change the way you react to them. Humor is good. Indifference works, annoyance, boredom, anything but, "OMG! It's all true!" and then getting really emotional. You will of course, but you start to catch it faster and find it funnier. You no longer slip into days or weeks of suffering and doubt, but you might have thirty minutes of suffering and doubt before you go, "Oh, crap. I'm doing it again." and snap out of it. Eventually, you're turning it around in seconds or not falling for it at all.