As a dietitian who works primarily with people who have eating disorders, I have a front-row seat to the body image struggles many young adults face in their college years. This period is a time when you’re developing your self-identity, which often means looking to your peers for validation. And college also marks the transition between childhood and adulthood, which brings a lot of mental, physical, and emotional changes.
All of this plays into how you think and feel about your body, a.k.a. your body image. “The definition of body image is complex and multifactorial,” Khadijah Booth Watkins, MD, MPH, a psychiatrist and the associate director of the Clay Center for Young Healthy Minds at Massachusetts General Hospital, tells SELF. “In the simplest of terms, it’s how you see yourself.” But body image isn’t just what you see in the mirror, Dr. Booth Watkins adds. It also encompasses how you feel about your appearance and the image you have of yourself in your head, which may or may not line up with what other people see when they look at you.
It isn’t set in stone either. Even if your body image was pretty solid in high school, that doesn’t mean it won’t be challenged in college. “Body image is dynamic and is tremendously impacted by family, environment, peers, and media,” Alyssa Goldenberg, LMSW, a therapist at The Dorm, a mental health treatment center for young adults, tells SELF. “College can be such a volatile and difficult time for body image as impressionable young adults are learning to navigate the world independently,” Goldenberg says.
Below, I consulted experts and dug into body-image research to identify some of the main reasons why your relationship with your body might be extra challenging while you’re in college—and what you can do to feel better about yourself.
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Know that your body will probably change during college.
There are so many factors that go into someone’s body shape and size. It’s hard to generalize what rate of growth and weight gain is “normal,” but the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention’s (CDC) developmental growth charts show that most people continue to gain weight until age 20 (and perhaps beyond, but this is where the growth charts end), even though height tends to taper off in your late teens.
Adjusting to a totally new food and movement routine—eating at a cafeteria instead of at home, going out more often (and maybe drinking alcohol), no longer participating in high school sports (if that was your thing), and having access to a gym for perhaps the first time—can also lead to changes in body shape and size. A meta-analysis published in 2015 in the journal BMC Obesity found that about two thirds of college freshmen gain weight over the course of the year, and that the average increase (excluding students whose weight didn’t change) is about 7.5 pounds.
These weight changes can add to the body image distress that you might already be feeling, particularly because we live in a culture that sees thinness as “ideal” and fatness as bad. But knowing that isn’t really true—and that college weight gain is totally normal—can help you be kinder to yourself and your body as you evolve throughout your time on campus.
Work toward body neutrality and acceptance.
Feeling great about your body when you’re also trying to stay on top of school and your social life might seem like a tall order, but that’s not necessarily the case. “A healthy body image involves having an objective perception of your appearance and an ability to separate your value as a person from the way you look,” Marcia Herrin, EdD, MPH, RDN, an eating disorder dietitian based in Lebanon, New Hampshire, and the coauthor of Nutrition Counseling in the Treatment of Eating Disorders, tells SELF. In other words, the goal isn’t necessarily to love how your body looks.
Source: SELF
