3 Tips For Men To Improve Their Body Image

It was great to intervew the Men’s Health Dietician, Dan Lewin, to discuss men’s body image. I was amazed at the number of males who are experiencing body image concerns and the effects that this can have on their mental health. I really hope we can break down the barriers for men to access the support and guidance that can get them on the path to accepting their body image and living a healthy fulfilling life as a result!

Check out the full interview below:

Here’s a summary of the 3 tips Dan covered to help men improve their body image:

Danielle McCarthy:  For people watching this video and obviously in a population where it might be hard for them to seek treatment, can you give us three tips that people can walk away with today to help them love and improve their body image?

Dan Lewin:  Absolutely. Both internal and external factors can influence our body image. So I want to start with a tip that’s quite broad. This tip involves having a think about how you view the external world. And I’m going to use an analogy to help this. So let’s say you want to buy a red sports car. When you have it in mind, all of a sudden, you’re just going to start seeing red sports cars everywhere on the road. You don’t really see that there’s 10,000 other different types of cars.

It’s like when we have particular body image goals and we want to look a particular way. We start to see that one particular body all around us and we forget that we live in a size diverse world, which is something that should actually be celebrated.

Danielle McCarthy:  So I’ve got a four month old baby as a lot of people would know. And when I was pregnant, I was so sure there was so many more pregnant women out there. Are you saying that that’s not the case? That everybody was not pregnant at the same time as me? Because everywhere I looked there were pregnant women. I don’t remember there ever being that many pregnant women before!

Dan Lewin:  Yes, that was likely the case. It was on your mind. That’s the image you had and that’s where you were going in your life so you just started to see it everywhere. The research is quite interesting in this area.

When we look at images of the body image ideal, if we don’t fit that ideal, we can start to develop a negative body image within two to three minutes of looking at those kind of images.

It’s incredible. So when someone’s social media feed is full of body building pages… just ask yourself “Is that affecting how I’m thinking about my body image after looking at those things?” And if it is, maybe it’s time to reexamine those pages and maybe unlike them, or delete them and find pages that make you feel good about yourself. So that’s tip number two. If you find you’re feeling negative about yourself after looking at certain social media feeds, unlike those pages.

Tip number three involves an element of mindfulness. It’s about being mindfully aware of internal conversations, particularly those conversations around physical appearance. This allows us to take a step back from our subjective experience and try and look at it objectively.

Danielle McCarthy:  Thank you so much again Dan for joining us and I hope everybody found that useful.