An important component of eating disorder recovery is learning to respect your body. Our culture's obsession with dieting fuels the belief that, if you restrict and sacrifice enough, you can achieve a smaller body size.
The reality, though, is that 95% of dieters regain weight over time. Bodies resist chronic restriction and have genetically influenced set point ranges that make sustained weight loss through dieting extremely difficult to maintain. Attempting to achieve and maintain a body size outside your natural range requires denying yourself proper nutrition, rest, and hydration, which leads to malnutrition, disordered eating, and eating disorders.
Body shape and size is as varied as different heights or shoe sizes. It's not an indicator of your overall health or a reflection of your self-worth. Below are four patterns that either undermine or build body respect as you move through recovery.
Body Checking
What Undermines Body Respect: Body checking involves repetitive behaviors focused on assessing, measuring, or monitoring your body size and shape. These behaviors provide temporary reassurance but ultimately keep you trapped in a cycle of evaluation rather than acceptance. Body checking can be visual, physical, or comparative in nature, but regardless of the method, it reinforces the belief that your body requires constant surveillance and judgment. Any pattern of self-assessment that lacks self-compassion and negatively impacts how you feel about yourself works against your recovery.
What Builds Body Respect: When you find yourself engaging in body checking practices, pause and use cognitive behavioral techniques to identify the feelings, thoughts, and behaviors at play and how they're linked. If you've been in therapy or treatment, this framework is likely familiar to you. Start asking yourself questions like: Why am I behaving this way? What am I looking for? Do I deserve this treatment? Would I talk to somebody I love in this way? If the answer is no, why do I treat myself so poorly? Considering these questions helps to raise your awareness of your inner thoughts and disordered behaviors, allowing you to look more critically at how you feel about them. As you notice that you're engaging in actions that make you feel badly about yourself, you can begin to disrupt and replace these choices with better ones.
If body checking has become a deeply ingrained routine, consider practical changes to your environment. Reducing mirrors and reflective surfaces to the best of your ability gives you the chance to practice going longer periods of time without visual checking. Since body checking often involves touch, replacing the behavior with other sensory experiences can help. If you feel really stuck in these habits, working with a therapist or nutritionist who specializes in eating disorders can provide additional support.
Movement and Exercise
What Undermines Body Respect: Not everyone with an eating disorder struggles with exercise, but for some, movement becomes a compensatory behavior rather than a health-promoting practice. Using exercise to "earn" food, to punish yourself for eating, or to control your weight all undermine body respect. Continuing to exercise when injured, pushing through pain, or feeling unable to take rest days are signs that movement has become disconnected from your body's actual needs and has instead become another way the eating disorder maintains control.
What Builds Body Respect: Exercise is genuinely beneficial when approached with the right intention. Movement keeps your bones strong, your heart healthy, and has a significant impact on mood and anxiety. It can also be an important part of trauma healing. The question to ask yourself is: what is my intention? Are you trying to build strength or maintain bone density? Are you incorporating bilateral movement like walking into your day to complement trauma therapies such as EMDR? When movement is oriented toward what your body can do rather than what it should look like, and when you can respect your body's signals for rest and recovery, exercise becomes a practice that supports rather than undermines your wellbeing.
Self-Care and Boundaries
What Undermines Body Respect: Many people in recovery from eating disorders struggle to prioritize their own care. They understand the amount of time and effort it takes to feed themselves well, get adequate rest, and manage their stress, but they're not taking care of themselves. Between work projects and school events, homework and activities, grocery shopping and household responsibilities, there's no time left. Pushing through and denying the needs of your body doesn't lead to favorable outcomes. Much like sleep, you can't catch up or get certain things back once you've let them go. Any day spent without proper nutrition is a day spent feeling distracted or unmotivated, not like your best self. It also compromises the body's ability to make important hormones and neurotransmitters like serotonin and dopamine that help us feel good and energized.
What Builds Body Respect: To effectively respect your body and take care of your own needs, you have to learn to say no. Sometimes this requires a significant change, like taking leave from work or adjusting your schedule. In other instances, a smaller shift, like stepping down from a volunteer position or getting groceries delivered, will suffice. Learning to tap out and set boundaries is essential to recovery. As you begin to prioritize your wellbeing, you'll start to see the many benefits of giving your body what it actually needs.
Media Consumption
What Undermines Body Respect: The content you consume shapes how you think about bodies, including your own. Engaging with media that glamorizes restrictive eating, overvalues thinness, or participates in rampant speculation about celebrities and their bodies keeps you immersed in the same messages that fuel eating disorders. Social media algorithms are designed to show you more of what you interact with, which means even passive scrolling can quickly fill your feed with harmful content.
What Builds Body Respect: Curating your media consumption is an active practice in recovery. Follow accounts that promote recovery-oriented messaging, body positivity, and diverse body representation. Unfollow or mute content that triggers comparison or reinforces eating disorder thinking. Your social media feed should support your recovery, not undermine it. Taking control of what you see on a daily basis is a small but powerful way to protect your mental health and reinforce that bodies of all sizes and shapes deserve respect.
The Science of Body Respect
At the Kahm Center for Eating Disorders, we often see the truth about genetic diversity reflected in our patients' metabolic test results and body composition analysis. These assessments reveal that metabolic and cellular health cannot be determined by BMI or body shape and size. This is one of the many reasons we use these tools in treatment: they provide neutral, scientific information that reinforces what recovery asks you to believe, which is that your body deserves respect at any size.
Learning to respect your body is one of the most challenging and life-changing aspects of eating disorder recovery. It requires unlearning deeply ingrained patterns and actively choosing practices that honor rather than harm. If you or someone you care about is struggling with an eating disorder, know that help is available and recovery is possible. Reach out to get started today.
Clinically Reviewed By
Nick Kahm, PhD
Co-Founder
Nick Kahm, a former philosophy faculty member at St. Michael's College in Colchester, VT, transitioned from academia to running the Kahm Clinic with his mother. He started the clinic to train dietitians in using Metabolic Testing and Body Composition Analysis for helping people with eating disorders. Now, he is enthusiastic about expanding eating disorder treatment through the Kahm Center for Eating Disorders in Vermont.
