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How body shame and depression work together

5 hours ago
7 min read

Growing up, I often felt awkward in my body.

I was pretty active, but a lot of my attention wasn’t necessarily on what my body could do. It was on how it looked, how I appeared to the world, and whether I was presenting myself in a way that other people would approve of.

I was also strongly influenced by the Church, which introduced another layer of complexity. I was trying to navigate two conflicting sets of expectations about what a young girl’s body should look like, how she should dress, and what she was allowed to do with it. There was a lot of policing from the outside world, and sometimes those messages directly contradicted one another.

What should I wear? How much of my body was appropriate to show? Was I supposed to be thin? How was I supposed to look? What did it mean when men sexualized me before I even understood what sex was?

I also struggled with feeling like I fit in. My racial identity, my height, and the way I looked all contributed to a sense that I didn’t quite belong in the image of what a girl was supposed to be.

And because I was someone who expressed herself through her body—through movement, clothing, and how I presented myself to the world—it wasn’t just about my appearance. It started to feel like other people were trying to tell me who I could and couldn’t be.

When you are young, it can be difficult to separate these messages from your own identity. You start wondering whether something is wrong with you when, in reality, you are trying to navigate a world that keeps telling you there is a right way to look and behave.

For me, this created a lot of confusion about my body and, ultimately, about myself.

Because here’s something we don’t always talk about: you cannot separate yourself from your body, and you cannot separate your body from yourself.

Your body is part of how you experience the world. It allows you to move, express yourself, connect with people, and experience pleasure. It is also the part of you that other people see, judge, comment on, and sometimes misunderstand.

When the world tells you that your body is wrong, it can start to feel as though you are wrong.

And the reality is that body shame doesn’t care what your body actually looks like or what it can do.

You can be thin and still hate your body. You can be athletic and still feel inadequate. You can receive compliments about your appearance and still struggle to believe that you are beautiful.

Body shame doesn’t require evidence. It simply finds a way to tell you that something about you is unacceptable.

That you need to change before you can feel comfortable in your own skin.

That you need to look different before you can be confident, desirable, or worthy.

And if you hear those messages long enough, you can begin to believe them.

How Does Body Shame Connect to Depression?

Our relationship with our bodies is not just about appearance. It can become deeply connected to our sense of worth.

For many women and girls, that relationship is shaped by the expectation that we should make other people happy. We learn to pay attention to how other people feel, how they perceive us, and whether we are meeting their expectations.

Sometimes, our bodies become part of that equation.

We may feel that we need to maintain a certain appearance to keep a romantic partner interested, receive approval from family members, or fit in with our peers. We may believe that if we look a certain way, people will treat us differently or finally see us as someone worth paying attention to.

It can become exhausting to feel as though your appearance is something you constantly have to manage to remain acceptable to other people.

And when your self-worth depends on something as changeable as how you look, you can end up feeling as though you are never quite doing enough.

This is one way body shame can contribute to depressive feelings. When your sense of worth becomes tied to external approval, your mood may become increasingly dependent on whether you receive that approval.

A bad photograph, an unkind comment, a change in your appearance, or a comparison with someone online can suddenly feel like evidence that you aren’t good enough.

Research has linked body dissatisfaction and negative body image with depressive symptoms, although the relationship is complex and does not mean that body shame alone causes depression.

Depression is not simply a matter of disliking yourself or feeling unhappy with your appearance. It can affect your mood, motivation, energy, concentration, relationships, and ability to experience pleasure. Body shame can be one part of a much larger emotional experience.

The Problem With the Idealized Female Body

We also have to talk about the culture we live in.

Whether we like it or not, our society continues to promote idealized standards of female beauty. Body positivity and body acceptance have become more visible, but that doesn’t mean the pressure to look a certain way has disappeared.

Growing up, many of us watched the rise of the Victoria’s Secret ideal: tall, extremely thin, polished, and conventionally beautiful. That image became a powerful reference point for what an attractive woman was supposed to look like.

Today, social media has introduced another version of the idealized body. We see the so-called Instagram body, often characterized by a tiny waist, defined abs, fuller breasts and hips, flawless skin, and carefully curated proportions.

These standards can be contradictory. One moment, the ideal is extremely thin; the next, it is thin with curves in precisely the right places.

And somehow, we are expected to keep up.

The problem isn’t that any particular body type is inherently wrong or that people shouldn’t enjoy caring about their appearance. The problem is when one narrow image becomes the standard against which everyone else measures themselves.

When there is a movement toward body acceptance, it is often responding to a culture that has taught people to feel ashamed of their bodies in the first place.

For girls, puberty can make this especially complicated. Bodies change, curves develop, and weight may naturally redistribute. At the same time, girls may be comparing themselves to images that have been edited, posed, filtered, or carefully selected to create an idealized appearance.

The result can be a painful disconnect between the body you actually have and the body you believe you are supposed to have.

And this pressure doesn’t exist in isolation. It can affect how you dress, whether you want to participate in activities, how comfortable you feel in relationships, and how much time you spend worrying about the way you look.

When so much of your attention is consumed by trying to fix yourself, it becomes difficult to simply live.

You deserve to have a life that is about more than managing your appearance.

What Has Helped Me: Learning to Own My Body

My relationship with my body is closely connected to my mental health. How I feel about myself can influence whether I feel grounded and confident or find myself slipping into a more negative emotional spiral.

Over time, I’ve come to believe that ownership is an important part of changing that relationship.

And by ownership, I don’t mean that you have to love every part of your body, feel beautiful every day, or become completely immune to what other people think.

I mean developing a relationship with yourself that is not entirely dependent on other people’s opinions.

No matter how beautiful the world tells you that you are, you still have to work toward knowing and accepting yourself.

Compliments can feel good. Being attracted to your own appearance can feel good. There is nothing wrong with wanting to feel beautiful.

But if your entire sense of worth depends on being considered beautiful by other people, you will always be waiting for someone else to tell you that you are enough.

And that is a difficult way to live.

So, how do you begin to change it?


Be curious

Find out what you like and what you don't. Build a relationship with your body.

Learn to interrupt the automatic assumption that you need to find something wrong with yourself.

Act as if you are the your most confident self.


A Final Thought

I don’t think the answer to body shame is to stop caring about your appearance entirely. Nor do I think we can simply decide to love ourselves and expect every insecurity to disappear.

For me, it is about learning to reclaim something that can so easily become a source of judgment and control.

Your body belongs to you. It is part of your identity, your experiences, your expression, and your life.

You get to decide how you want to care for it, how you want to express yourself through it, and what kind of relationship you want to build with it.

Other people may have opinions. Society will continue to promote beauty standards. And there will probably be days when you look in the mirror and struggle with what you see.

But you can practice responding to yourself differently.

You can learn to notice the parts of yourself you appreciate. You can challenge the belief that you need to look a certain way to deserve love. You can stop treating every insecurity as proof that something is wrong with you.

And perhaps most importantly, you can begin to build a life in which your body is something you live in, rather than something you spend all your time trying to fix.

You do not have to become more beautiful to become more worthy. You are already worthy of taking up space.

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