What is body image perfectionism and how does it affect body image healing?

Body image perfectionism is the belief that if you do enough healing work, you will arrive at a permanent state of being unbothered by your body — never bothered by the mirror, other people’s comments, or your body’s changes over time. This belief blocks healing. It applies the same perfectionism that diet culture installed in the first place, now aimed at the healing process itself. When hard moments still show up, you conclude the work isn’t working.

Body image healing does not eliminate difficult experiences. It builds the capacity to move through them without derailing your day. The real goal is body neutrality — a midline you return to after hard moments, not a permanent state of comfort. That requires emotional resilience and nervous system regulation skills, not a perfect body image outcome.

Transcript 

[00:00:00] Stephanie: Hello, my sisters welcome back to It’s Beyond The Food Podcast. I’m Stephanie Dodier, clinical nutritionist, certified intuitive eating counselor, and your host of It’s Beyond the Food Show. And this is a place where we talk all about what’s driving our relationship to food, to our body, and with ourselves.

[00:00:18] And today I wanna talk about something that I see unfortunately. Too much in the body image healing journey. Something that’s to most people, like the goal of the journey of healing your relationship to your body, but it’s not, and it’s called body image perfectionism. And it actually came from one of you listener of this podcast through my DM and my conversation with her I think can be beneficial to all of us on this podcast.

[00:00:50] So let’s do this.

[00:00:52] Now before I get into talking about body image healing perfectionism it is tax season in Canada, which I know it is in the United States as well. I don’t know any other country in the world, but very happily yesterday, submitted all my paperwork to my accountant and I have now received. The net amount of my tax bill that I’m due to pay, and I’m so proud of myself.

[00:01:19] I have the money set aside. And if you’re an entrepreneur, you know exactly what I mean. That damn dreaded tax bill where you forecast at the beginning of the year, how much you’re gonna have to pay in tax and like it’s in the back of your mind all the time. Is it gonna be the right number? And it’s the right number.

[00:01:37] I actually have some money left over from the saving I had predicted. I’m actually, it’s gonna fuel my trip probably to Brazil this summer. So, very excited about that. Wanted to share it with you. And I want you, if you are in that season of tax bill, you’re not alone. You’re not alone. You’re gonna get through this, which is, this conversation is actually a perfect entry point into what we’re gonna talk about today.

[00:02:03] Because I was noticing what I was doing with these thoughts of like, have I projected perfectly the right amount of saving for my tax bill or not how I was managing, or what I like to call entertaining these thoughts or now. So just more on that in a moment. Stick with me with this. So I wanna give you the backstory on the question.

[00:02:34] So one of the listener of the podcast reach out to me on the DM because I always say like you, if you have any feedback or any question, you’re welcome to reach out to me on Instagram dm. And she asked me a super simple question. And here’s a question, do you have bad body image day? She asked me permission to ask me a personal question.

[00:03:01] And I say, yeah, absolutely, I will answer it. And then she sent me this, do you still have bad body image today? And my gut answer was to answer no. But then I step back. I’m like, I wonder if we have the same definition of what is a bad body image day? ’cause she wasn’t a client of mine, or at least she’s never worked in a high level coaching program where I physically interacted with her life.

[00:03:30] She may have purchased a course, like a class, but she’s never physically coached with me, so I don’t know who she was. And I asked her to tell me, so what does a bad body image day look like to you? And what she described to me, I think many of you will recognize for her, it mainly happens in the morning when she looks at herself coming out of the shower or in her walking closet, putting on clothes, and she’s passing in front of the mirror and the way her body reflection lands in her.

[00:04:06] And the result of that reflection on her mood and how her day unfold and sometime put her into an anxious place, she starts the day thinking, oh my God, here we go again. I’m having a bad body image day. My entirety is gonna be screwed. She’s a leader and she says she gets very reactive with her team.

[00:04:29] When she’s in the bad body image day, she gets short tampered. She’s very impatient. She made snaps and it all started by how her reflection in the mirror was experienced by her. So as I thought about what she was describing as a bad body image day is not what I call a bad body image day. So my answer wasn’t really accurate.

[00:04:58] That’s why like I’m so glad I took the time to step back and say like. I got into coach mode, right? Even though it was a DM conversation, right? And went into coach, I’m like, but tell me what is a bad body image like for you? Because we don’t have the same definition. So me just telling her no will fuel that body image perfectionism because the truth is I have days where I am short-tempered in my interaction with other human being.

[00:05:31] I have them, but I do not call them bad body image. They, even though that they may have started with me being annoyed with my body for X, Y, Z reason, I don’t link how I felt about my body in the morning to how my day unfolded because I know they’re not late and I know how my day’s unfolding. It’s not because of my body.

[00:05:58] It’s the human experience. And that distinction is at the core of what I’m gonna teach you right now.

[00:06:08] So the concept of body image perfectionism is when you have a belief that when you have healed your body image enough. Done the work enough. Done the work hard enough. Long enough, well enough prescriptively following the protocol. Enough you’ll arrive at a place where you are permanently unbothered by your body that you will never not have days where the reflection and the mirror.

[00:06:51] It’s hard to process where you’ll never have days where you’re noticing parts of your body that you are not liking. You’ll never have days where how you think about your body takes up too much space too much space in a negative way that you’ll be neutral at all the time forever. And that’s the key here forever.

[00:07:16] Because body image today at 30 or 40 is gonna be different than body image at 50, at 60, at 70. So the body image perfectionism will lead you to things that the experience you’re having of your body at 30. Once you’ve done enough body image work, will prevent and seal off the deal for the rest of your life.

[00:07:41] So when the wrinkle and the gray hair. Start showing up, you’ll be like, yay, bring them on, right? Because you’ll be unbothered.

[00:07:52] But the truth is, body image work does not eliminate the challenging moment with your body. It doesn’t eliminate the difficult experience with your body. It gives you the capacity to have these challenging moment without them derailing your entire day, week, or month. It’s the ability to ride the full range experience of your human body, of your relationship to your human body and come back to baseline.

[00:08:36] And fundamentally that’s what neutrality means. Neutrality, and this is why I’m a body neutrality fan. That’s why I teach body neutrality because in my early days as a non-diet nutritionist, I thought that body positivity, positive body image was the goal, and I strive towards that in my own life and it.

[00:09:09] Got me to a place back where it felt unachievable because the definition of positive body image is liking how your body looks, right? Like I love all the principle of positive body image except that one, and that’s why for me, body neutrality is nearly the same thing as positive body image, except with the fact that you have to like and enjoy your body.

[00:09:39] And because of my feminist lands on this, I’m like, that’s not the goal. It was never the goal and it should not be the goal. So neutrality is the midline. And from that midline, you can have hard moment, you can oscillate, right? If you’ve listened to recent podcast episode body image oscillation, you can go up and you can go down, you can have an easy experience with your body, but you’re able to come back.

[00:10:07] To neutral line, you’re able to pass in front of the mirror and say, whoa, I don’t like this. And keep moving and not have the opinion that you had of the glance in the mirror impact how you talk to your team three hours down the road. This is what healing body image heal. It’s not about a permanent.

[00:10:35] A resident of comfort in your body. It’s about being able to oscillate, go up and down, and that’s what I call the body image experience. So for me it’s not about body image perfectionism, it’s about being able to ride the body image experience, not perfections. So I’ve given you already a couple of example around body perfectionism and how.

[00:11:02] It can show up in life with this client and with me. But I wanna give you more so you can really anchor into determining if this is you or not. One of the other cornerstone of body perfectionism is thinking and assuming when I’ve done enough body image healing, I’ll never be bothered by other people’s comment around my body.

[00:11:28] That other people glance, look, judgment faces towards my body will not bother me. That example, when I get older, I won’t be bothered by wrinkle and gray hair.

[00:11:46] Basically thinking that. I’ll never be bothered by my body again. Here’s another example that really doesn’t, we’re not gonna talk about body image purely, but we’re gonna talk about another experience in our relationship to our body. Because inevitably when I talk about, or I coach someone on body image, for many people who have chronic health issue, it lands us into the place of talking about beyond the looks of their body, but their relationship to their health issue, to their symptoms, to their disability, and how.

[00:12:32] They can be also neutral to that, that being resentful of their health condition will actually prevent them from achieving neutrality and it in the same place is trying to achieve. Healthism Perfect health will get you into a place where you’ll be constantly bothered by your health symptoms.

[00:12:57] So I give you the experience of, for me, I have chronic health issue in that I have scoliosis in my back and it result in random flare up of chronic pain, literally random. It can happen anywhere, anytime, and, sometimes it takes me off for the rest of the day. Like yesterday, it took me off for half the day I have to lay in bed completely screwing up my schedule so that I can be laying down on a heat pad and managing the pain to a place where I don’t feel like puking.

[00:13:34] This is how bad it can get sometimes, and. When the flare up starts, it escalate very quickly. For those of you who may not be familiar with flareups of chronic pain, it usually will start like at a one outta 10, and usually within 10 minutes it goes up to a eight outta 10. So when I first feel the sensation in my body of that flare up, right there is a fleeting moment where like, ugh.

[00:14:05] Fuck. Not today. I don’t wanna have that. I don’t have time to have that. I don’t want it to show up. And I can have that relationship to like, Ugh, my God, why is this happening? But it doesn’t last the whole rest of the day and the day after, like it used to. I, for me, chronic player flare up because I wasn’t able to ride the disappointments and I was disappointed in my body for still having chronic player flare up after doing all this work.

[00:14:41] It would take me off a days where now I’m like, last five minutes. I’m like, okay, let’s stop working and go lay on our heat pad in our bed and just nurture our body. Nurture my body ’cause that’s what it wants right now. And that’s what body image healing is to me, is developing that relationship with our body.

[00:15:04] So our body can be what it needs to be from an appearance perspective, but also from a health and symptom perspective. Act.

[00:15:13] And I wanna give you one more example. So if you’re on YouTube right now, I’m gonna stand up and you’re gonna see a graphic tee. And if you’re listening on the podcast, I’m wearing a graphic tee today, and it’s a feminist graphic tee talks about the female gaze. And when I first put it on, and I went in front of the mirror this morning, right?

[00:15:35] My belly roll was. Distorting the writing on the graphic T and for like, hmm, I don’t know a minute. I was annoyed. I was annoyed with having a belly roll that distort the very important message that I believe into, that I wanted to display on my shirt, because let’s face it, we’re, I’m this, I’m recording this on April 22nd.

[00:16:07] 2026 and we’re literally days after the reveal of this website on the internet, the rape academy, where just last month 60 million people went and visited a site to teach man how to women. So I was, I was sitting, I was reading a post this morning about this, and I wanted to express myself. I wanted to put that graphic.

[00:16:35] T-shirt and then my belly is distorting the writing. It was not happy. In that moment, it was annoyance, but in that moment I had a choice and it’s, it’s like, okay, oh, we’re gonna ride the annoyance. Need it with self-compassion or am I going to entertain the annoyance and start discussing with my brain as to why I shouldn’t have a belly roll and why it’s unfair that diet culture got it’s gripped on me for 25 years and why I was sent the weight watcher at 12 years old in the past, I would’ve been that.

[00:17:14] I would’ve stirred on all those stories and everything that I did wrong, and it would’ve caused me a whole other array of emotion to deal with anger, resentment, sadness, grief, and all of that. But in that moment, I’m like, oh, okay. We’re annoyed. Okay. Makes total sense for me to be annoyed because I wanted to share my message.

[00:17:41] And let’s move on. Like it’s not gaslighting myself. I didn’t gaslight myself that I wasn’t annoyed. I acknowledged that I was annoyed, but then I’m making a choice to move on because it’s totally normal for me to be annoyed to have a belly roll that distort the message that I want the world to read. So that’s are the two example.

[00:18:03] Now it happens and specifically for us, it happens because we are socialized as women to think that our body should look a certain way, the whole thin ideal, and that our body is a signal to the world that we are worthy and that we should be perfect. It should be perfect in the way our body looked, but we should be perfect in our grades, in our, uh, professional work, in the way our business performed, like perfectionism in whatever we do.

[00:18:38] Is how we show our value to the world and that the world can te give us a pass saying, yep, you’re doing it right, you’re perfect. And we bring that good girl syndrome. That’s really what it’s called. I have a podcast episode. You can scroll back up and we bring that mindset. I gotta remember, mindset is a collection of thinking pattern.

[00:19:04] It’s a collection of thoughts, like a mindset is just repetitive lines of thinking. So we bring the mindset that we must be perfect into body image healing, and we aim for body image perfectionism. And because we don’t know anything else, we keep striving for that perfectionism even in our healing work.

[00:19:30] And then the other angle to this is that. Yeah, we’ve been told that our bodies are ticket to being valued and happy, and we come into the world of body acceptance. You’re like, okay, my body still needs to be the ticket by which I’m going to achieve this happy life. And we’re saying, okay, I’m gonna achieve that happy life with.

[00:19:56] This body that I have right now, and the way to do that is through body image perfectionism. So I’ll never be disturbed with anything around my body. But here’s the deal, that is not the human experience. No matter which spiritual background that you have or organized religion you belong to, I don’t know of any spiritual lineage that teach that life should be perfect.

[00:20:24] That we should have an undisturbed, completely picture perfect life. I mean, there may be some cult. I don’t know that any of us are here. And if you are in a cult, we need to get you support and help to get you out of there. But most average spiritual background doesn’t teach that we teach about the human experience.

[00:20:47] And it’s about showing up spiritually. It’s about showing up to the human experience, which is 50 50. There’s gonna be 50% of your days that are gonna be happy days, and there’s gonna be 50% of your days that are gonna be shitty. But if. You are in the mindset that life should be perfect and that your gateway to that perfect life is your body.

[00:21:14] You’re gonna make, you’re gonna aim for body image, perfection. And guess what? You’ll never get there because that’s not what is happening with the human experience. So there’s gonna be good days and bad days, but it’s not because of the body, it’s because it’s the human experience.

[00:21:33] And when you keep trying to have that. Perfect. Happy all the time. Experience, body image, perfection. You’re, you’re trying to aim from an unbothered perfect experience of your body. You create a whole slew of other emotion, as I said earlier, and you never gonna get there. So you’re stressing as to why you’re not gonna get there.

[00:21:58] That has health consequence. And interestingly enough I should do a whole podcast episode on my chronic pain flare up. But when, about six years ago when I really made it my mission to be body neutral instead of body positive coincidentally enough, my flare up in my back started to reduce. Now there is no evidence of this.

[00:22:25] This is just me. Talking to you about a clinical experience in my own body, but I have a theory that because my anxiety level went down, because my stress level went down of having to achieve perfect body image, I believe my body and the flare up weren’t present because of that reduced level of stress in my life.

[00:22:53] And I’ve had other clinical. Experience being shared with me for some of my client that it actually, their wellbeing was better because they let go of that body image perfectionism. So food for thought for you. No evidence on this. So what can we do from here? So if you are a health professionals, supporting people with.

[00:23:16] Body image. Here’s what I need you to understand. Before you coach body image effectively, you need to understand the 50 50 of the human experience. You need to understand that life is not. Supposed to be good at all time. That is not the destination, and therefore it is also not the destination when it comes to body image healing.

[00:23:41] And that if you are helping people with body image and really with health behavior change globally, you need to teach emotional resiliency to your client and is in your scope of practice. Emotional resilience tool, nervous system regulation tool is in your scope of practice. That is not a licensed act.

[00:24:04] Now, trauma healing is. Trauma unpacking is, that’s a scope of practice that is not yours. But teaching basic emotional resiliency, nervous system regulation is in your scope and it must be side by side with any body image teaching and coaching. Otherwise your client won’t be able to process the discomfort, the disgust, the sadness and the grief that they have in accepting, their body.

[00:24:37] And also, we need to understand intersectionality and socialization that needs to be brought into your coaching protocol with your client. And I think in our practice it is fairly well known that we have what we call the social determinant of health. That our health is well beyond our physical body, that our social environment, our relationship, our demographic factor, social economical factor impact our health.

[00:25:09] We call that the social determinant of health. When we move into body image, we moge into any kind of behavior change. We have to consider intersectionality of how. The identity of the person in front of us, how, who they show up into the world being gender, race social background, culture, sexual orientation, how they show up into the world will have an attached pattern of socialization within the body image scope.

[00:25:43] So how, as the person they are that they show up into the world with, how are they socialized? To their body. You’re not expected to know their socialization, but you’re expected to ask question so that you and them together can determine and outline their socialization to their body and how that’s impacting and how they are expecting their body image experience to be. So these are the two factor I would recommend. And the third one is to make sure that is included in your intake process with your client and have the conversation as to why body image perfectionism is not the end goal.

[00:26:33] The journey of coaching with them is about learning to move through the body image experience without reaching the body image perfectionism if you are on your personal journey. You just got a free coaching session, right? You just got a free coaching session, and I would say to you if you are not gonna work with somebody who specialize in that, that to make sure that you go seek book podcasts, you can scroll back through my podcast feed here.

[00:27:10] And learn emotional intelligence tool, emotional resiliency, nervous system regulation. That’s kind of the magic ingredient that will make your body image experience neutral is learning these tools.

[00:27:28] So I can help you with some of these. We have free tools on the podcast, but if you’re listening to this live, twice a year, I run a body image coaching mentorship, and in spring of 2026, this body image mentorship is happening on May 1st and second. It is the immersive version, which we take the experience and we make it over two days.

[00:27:57] So it’s a very intense focus approach to deliver over a two full day. Uh, my body image coaching curriculum. So it gets you up to speed very quickly and it also gives us a lot of time to have in-depth conversations. So if you want to come and work with me and learn that we’ll put the registration in the show note of this podcast and you’ll find it everywhere on my bio and are on our website, body Image Mentorship if you go to the shop page, and that is open to all of you.

[00:28:32] Okay, my sister. I love you and I’ll see you on the next podcast episode.