When you constantly feel down about yourself or are struggling with your body, it affects everything—the way you interact with people, the opportunities you go after (or don’t), and even whether you allow yourself to dream big.

Overcoming body frustration is about more than vanity or surface-level self-love. It’s getting comfortable with who you truly are at your core. It’s about healing your most important relationship — the one with yourself. 

Let’s dive into how body image can affect every part of your life, and how shifting your mindset about your body can transform the way you show up in your life.

Why You Feel Frustrated in Your Body 

Nobody wants to feel bad about themselves, yet for so many of us, that’s the norm. Feeling insecure about our bodies is seen as expected, while confidence is often dismissed as fake or delusional. This is all thanks to society conditioning us over and over to believe that thinner = better, healthier, more lovable. This dangerous, faulty belief system creates a very real weight stigma against people in larger bodies and internalized fatphobia in many of us. 

But these thoughts don’t disappear overnight, even when you’re rejecting diet culture. Something will happen to bring up that feeling, and the frustration creeps up all over again. Be patient and compassionate with yourself when it happens, and allow yourself to recognize the emotions when they crop up. 

Frustration with your body can also arise when you just don’t feel good in your body. Maybe your energy is low, you have aches and pains, you feel like you can’t move the way you used to, or your body just feels different than it did before. This can lead to worrying about your health and wanting to be healthier. I 100% get that. There are health conditions that correlate with being at a higher weight, but remember: correlation is not causation. While it’s tempting to diet to be “healthier,” dieting itself produces weight cycling, which makes all of those health conditions worse.

The False Promises of Diet Culture 

Diet culture promises that if you try hard enough and stick to the program, you’ll get results just like those people in their before-and-after ads. You know the ones, where the person looks sad in the before, but smiling in the after as they hold out their “fat pants”. This is a false promise wrapped up in sheep’s clothing because those pictures only tell part of the story. They don’t tell you about all the weight you’ll gain back after the diet (and sometimes even more). Instead, they say that it’s your fault, that you didn’t have enough willpower, you didn’t try hard enough to be happy and healthy.

That is not true.

The truth is that diets are not an effective long-term strategy. Dieting goes against your biology and messes with your health instead of honoring it, leaving you stuck in a weight loss cycle and making your body and metabolism feel worse over time.

Can Grief Actually Help You Accept Your Body?

Learning to move past society’s expectations and diet culture’s false promises is tough. You have to let go of the dream body you think you “should” have, of the fantasy that some diet or particular way of eating will make you feel in control of food, healthy, and physically comfortable in your body. 

Before you can find true body acceptance, you have to go through the grieving process. 

This often is interpreted as letting yourself go. It’s not. You’re giving yourself space to come to terms with the reality that dieting does not work. You’re experiencing radical acceptance that now opens the door to you finding a new way to relate to food and your body. 

And like with grief, there are different stages of grief that occur with our body image. 

• Denial – You’re still attached to the idea that the only way to lose weight is to go on a diet. 
• Bargaining – You decide you’ll try just one more diet or you’ll lose weight the “healthy” way 
• Anger – You get angry with diet culture or maybe even yourself for falling for it so many times
• Depression – You feel sad for the loss of your dream body or a magical diet that will fix everything 
• Acceptance – You let go of the fantasy and are ready to come to terms with the body you have

Going through this process is difficult, so be patient and kind with yourself, and know that life gets so much better on the other side when you’re not chasing a smaller body. You get to address your health and physical discomfort in direct, effective ways that improve your quality of life. 

How to Shift Your Mindset and Find Peace in Body Image

So how do you change your mindset from frustration and to body peace? Let’s dive into a few strategies to help. 

1. Redefine Success 

Instead of focusing on your weight, what does success actually mean when it comes to your health and happiness? What are you aiming for? 

Perhaps you want to feel more vibrant and energetic, to have more fun and adventure, or you have big career dreams you’ve been putting off until you lost weight. Identify what actually matters to you. 

2. Challenge Old Beliefs

Play the “Why” game. Ask yourself what you want, and use “Why” to keep going deeper. 

For example: 

• “I want to lose weight.” 
• “Why?”
• “So that I can be healthier.”
• “Okay. Why?” 
• “So that I can feel better and live longer.” 
• “Okay. What does feeling better mean for you?” 

Do you see how you can hone in on the thing that truly matters to you so you can directly address it, instead of letting your brain assume that weight loss is the only avenue to get there? 

(We go through this exact process on Days 1 and 2 of the UnChallenge! if you want to dismantle old food rules and beliefs, and replace them with new beliefs that serve you better moving forward, I would love to see you there.)

3. Practice Self-Compassion

Moving through and past body and weight frustration is hard, so remember to speak to yourself with kindness rather than criticism. Know (and remind yourself when you need to) that body fluctuations are normal. If you wouldn’t say those things to a friend, don’t say them to yourself (I know it’s corny, but trust me, it works!).

4. Trust the Process of Intuitive Eating 

Part of the early stages of healing your relationship with your body and food is learning to trust your hunger and fullness cues. With those diets, your weight has yo-yoed all over the place and you learned to ignore your body’s signals, so your body doesn’t trust you. Trusting the process of intuitive eating means your body learns to trust you back. 

This happens over a period of time, but when your body trusts you, your metabolism works best and your weight stabilizes at where it’s meant to be. 

Practical Takeaways Moving Forward 

This is a long-term process, so here’s a few practical strategies to help you keep moving forward: 

• Use the following journal prompts to explore body frustration:
  • What negative messages about my body am I still holding onto?
  • What is the story I’m telling myself about my body and my weight, and what it means about me?
  • What do I worry that others are thinking when they look at me?
  • What fears do I have about my body or my weight?
• Use “My body is not the enemy,” or “My body is my friend” as daily affirmations.
• Take small, tangible action steps each day, like unfollowing triggering accounts, buying clothes that fit comfortably, or downloading the body kindness guide
• Remember, it’s okay to have hard days, and you’ll have to sometimes “sit in the stuck”  but you don’t have to stay stuck.

Key Takeaways

Frustration is part of the journey to body acceptance, not a sign of failure. Learning how to recognize the frustration, sit with it, practice body kindness (especially on the rough days), and to see this as part of doing the work helps you make progress on your intuitive eating journey instead of falling back into dieting.

Remember — your body is not a problem to be solved. You are so much more than your weight. You are worthy, just as you are. 

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