Body Checking: What is it and how do I stop?

Written by CCTC Staff Writer

So you stare at yourself in the shop window while you’re walking down the street — isn’t it normal for people to do that? Or, perhaps you weigh yourself every day. How harmful could that be? These are all forms of body checking, which can be detrimental for your mental health and keep you stuck in an eating disorder.

If you want to break free of your anxious obsessions over your body, and the distressing behaviors you engage in “just to check” on certain parts of your body, this post will:

Explain more about body checking and why you really do it
Tell you the common recovery pitfalls in terms of body image and checking behaviors
Show you how to stop body checking
Give you general tips on how to reduce compulsive behaviors and improve body image

What is body checking?

Body checking is the compulsive checking or tracking of your body’s shape, size, weight, or other physical features. This compulsive behavior stems from an anxious obsession with how your body feels, looks, and appears to change over time. For many eating disorder sufferers, their perception of their bodies is inaccurate, negative, and extremely anxiety-inducing.

Different people have different obsessions when it comes to their bodies. One person may obsess over and compulsively check the way their legs seem to fit in a certain pair of pants. Another may stare at their nose, which they have decided is “too big”, for over ten minutes in the mirror.

Body checking behaviors range from mild to debilitating. People with body dysmorphic disorder have a severely distorted view of a perceived “flaw”, engage in constant body checking behaviors, and may even take drastic measures to “fix” their flaws.

Forms of Body Checking:

Excessive weighing (more than once a week is excessive)
Staring at yourself in the mirror, hyper focused on your “flaws”
Measuring your body with a tape measure
Recording changes in your body
Obsessively focusing on how you feel in your clothes as a way to determine whether your size has changed
Feeling areas of your body (e.g. stomach, thighs, arms) to ensure they haven’t drastically changed from the last time you “checked”
Constantly seeking reassurance about your weight, shape, size, or physical features from yourself or others
Obsessing over current or past photos of yourself
Staring at yourself in shop windows, car mirrors, or other reflective surfaces
Comparing your body to the bodies of people around you, often evaluating how much larger or smaller your body is compared to others
Comparing your body to others’ on social media

Body comparison in eating disorder treatment and online eating disorder recovery communities can be one of the most triggering forms of body checking out there, and acts as a huge barrier to full, lasting recovery.

Why is body checking so devastating?

Body checking is one of the biggest things that hold people back from making a full recovery. Often, individuals have increasingly distorted perceptions of their body after a little while in recovery. That may cause so much distress that they either slip up in their recovery, or refuse to gain the amount of weight they need to in order to really be free from their eating disorder.

It’s also really common in eating disorder recovery to fall into a fitness obsession. Individuals decide it’s okay to gain weight, as long as it’s muscle and they look “toned” or “fit.” But this often creates exercise compulsions and rigid “clean eating”. Body checking tendencies also typically shift towards measuring the look, feel, and percentages of muscle vs. fat.

Someone struggling with body checking often has difficulty concentrating on their surroundings. They literally miss out on what’s right in front of them.

And in general, body checking can provoke spirals of depression, anxiety, and panic attacks.

How do I stop body checking in eating disorder recovery?

Negative body image and unrealistic body perceptions do not go away with weight gain — in fact, these may get more severe with weight gain.

Until you are stable enough in your recovery to handle the anxiety that comes with letting go of these specific eating disorder behaviors, stopping body checking is not your top priority. It can help to wear flowy, comfortable clothes, that way it won’t be so easy to engage in body checking behaviors.

But when you’re ready to work on body checking behaviors, try to do so with a professional treatment provider. If that’s not possible, try to involve your support system as you’re decreasing body checking behaviors.

1. Identify the form of body checking you’re engaging in and what you get out of it.

Body checking — like all eating disorder behaviors — serves a purpose. As you notice yourself engaging in a specific body checking behavior, ask yourself what you’re getting out of it.

As an example, say you weigh yourself every single day. When you step on the scale, ask yourself: Why am I doing this? How do I feel after the behavior? Does it impact my actions?

Weighing yourself might:

Relieve anxiety about “not knowing” your weight
Give you (incorrect) information about how yesterday’s activities have affected your weight
Provide a sense of satisfaction if you engaged in eating disorder behaviors to lose weight
Be a way to calm your eating disorder’s voice, as it convinces you to weigh yourself to keep you trapped in eating disorder behaviors forever

Now consider whether this behavior serves you long-term, and whether it’s worth hanging on to. Do you really feel better after body checking? Does it drive you to make the right decisions, or the ones that keep you trapped in your eating disorder?

While weighing yourself might give you temporary relief from the fear of “not knowing” your weight, the act of obsessively weighing will cause panic and anxiety later on. You may struggle to make recovery-focused choices later on in the day, out of the fear of gaining weight. Or, you may feel an intense wave of sadness if you don’t lose weight after engaging in behaviors.

2. Measure how often you do this body checking behavior.

Now that you’ve identified the body checking behavior you want to stop, measure how often you do it. Keep a running tally of how many times you body check over the span of a few days.

You might be surprised at how much of your time and mental energy body checking takes up.

3. Develop strategies to reduce, and eventually eliminate, body checking behaviors.

Ideally, you work with an eating disorder treatment professional to identify two or three areas you’d like to focus on first. That way, you won’t get overwhelmed at the idea of changing all your behaviors at once.

With your therapist, you’ll work to:

Reduce the number of times you body check in a day
Limit when or for how long you engage in body checking
Postpone the behavior (e.g. holding off on weighing yourself for a day)
Eliminate the behavior entirely

Don’t expect to stop every compulsive behavior “cold turkey.” For some people, doing something drastic like completely throwing away their scale as soon as they come home from therapy might work. But for others, this can cause so much anxiety that they consistently restrict, just to “make sure” they’re not gaining weight.

In the scale example, you might:

Reduce the number of times you weigh yourself in a day or week. If you weigh yourself five times a day, you might reduce that to three, then one, and so on.
Find a distraction to postpone weighing yourself. This is especially important in instances such as binging or purging, where your weight can definitely fluctuate and cause severe distress.
Finally, once you’re ready, give your scale away. Or, if you’re up for it, smash it! The sense of freedom is indescribable.

There will be many moments where you feel the need to body check. Keep your hands or eyes busy when you have those urges. If you feel the need to feel or pinch a part of your body, play with thinking putty or fidget toys, play a game on your phone, draw, color, learn how to fold origami — do anything that involves intense focus with your hands. And if you feel the need to look at yourself or someone else to compare, use grounding techniques or get really involved in an activity to keep yourself from comparison.

General Tips to Stop Body Checking:

1. Get rid of tools that enable body checking behaviors.

Remove items that allow you to measure any part of your body: scales, tape measures, body fat percentage calculators, etc. Then, you won’t feel the need to “check”, and make yourself miserable as you do so.

Also take away reminders of your “sick body”, so you don’t feel compelled to “get back to” that size (and potentially relapse.) This includes getting rid of your “sick clothes”, records of your previous weights, and pictures that may be triggering to you.

2. Unfollow or mute triggering social media accounts.

If you follow people who were your “body goals”, unfollow them now. If an eating disorder recovery account shows “before and after” photos, which are problematic in many ways, or shows pictures of them at a low weight in general, and you start comparing your body to theirs, unfollow them. They’re not helping your recovery — it doesn’t mean you’re a bad person, or the owner of that account is intentionally being harmful. It’s just not helping, and that’s okay.

What about the people in your life that you follow? Maybe you “check up” on people from highschool to compare how everyones’ bodies have changed. Or what if you compare yourself to someone you know who seems “perfect” online? Do you unfollow them?

Not necessarily — just mute them for the time being. Later on, if and when body checking isn’t such a big problem, you can unmute them.

It is important to make your social media a positive space in order to foster your recovery.

3. Shift your body focus from how it looks, to what it can do for you.

A part of the body neutrality movement philosophy is the idea that you don’t have to love your body, but you can appreciate it for what it does for you.

Instead of focusing on your looks or how your appearance has changed in recovery, focus on what your body in recovery can do. Your arms might be larger than you’d like, but they have the strength to carry loved ones, pet animals, and carry important items. You may not have a thigh gap (and most healthy people do not), but your thighs are strong enough to carry you on walks, on bike rides, and keep up with your loved ones.

This is not an easy mentality to adopt — people have been told to hate their bodies by the diet industry, so loving your body for its abilities is nothing short of revolutionary.

If you or a loved one is suffering from an eating disorder or compulsive body checking, take the first step today and talk to someone about recovery or simply learn more about the holistic, flexible recovery programs we offer.

Ai PonoSeptember 27, 2021