On the left, the beginning of my journey. On the right, where I am now.
As I write this blog, I feel very good about how I look in my underwear. Sometimes I’m ashamed to admit that, primarily because I think it’s an awfully vain thing to admit. But it’s true.
I’ve struggled with “body image” for the greater part of my life. I’m going to qualify all the statements I’ve made in this post so far. Before that- let me make one more. I think many people that struggle like I do try to “solve” that problem backwards, so I want to share how I went on that journey. The process is one that you can replicate for anything, not just that niggling sensation you get when you pass a mirror.
Let’s start with a bit of history. I can’t remember the first time I looked upon my own body with disgust but I’m guessing it was sometime in my early teenage years. I’d venture to guess that’s true for a lot of people. As a parent of an 11 year old, I’m witnessing someone become more judgmental of other people’s perception of her in real time.
If I look back over the course of my life, I think one thing I can only understand in retrospect (now that I feel better) is that body image is not a static perception. It’s true to say that in the past I had a general perception of my own body, but it’s also true that it was not all the time. That is to say, even when my perception was “negative” it was perhaps negative 80% of the time. So 20% of the time I thought “hey, I look pretty good actually!”.
The same goes for now. I would rate my body image as “positive”. That means that most of the time I think I look good, and considerably less of the time I’m doubting that. It’s quite a relief given two very important parts of my life. One is that I am married and the other is that I compete in a sport that more or less requires that I show up to practice with other people in skin tight spandex smaller than most men’s underwear.
I hear people sometimes pitch the solution to body image as “just don’t care about what anyone else thinks about your body”. To me that advice belongs in the scrap heap alongside saying “relax” to stressed people, “focus” to distracted people and “cheer up” to depressed people, or as I am now dubbing it: the holy trinity of bad psychological advice.
If you have a thought in your mind, there is no voluntary delete function. If you are thinking, especially chronically negatively, about your body, you cannot just “stop”. You have basically two choices (not mutually exclusive) in situations where you want to change your internal dialogue:
Intentionally build focus around new dialogues in order to crowd out your negativity
Lean into the thing that you’re mind goes to and find a way to change the narrative to something that works for you.
For body image, I mostly employed the second strategy. I’m going to lay out what I did to change the narrative that I had for myself. In order to execute this strategy I had two primary tactics:
Capturing Self Directed Positivity
I’m going to confess something I’ve probably already admitted on a podcast: I have literally hundreds of shirtless selfies of myself. Whenever I go to show someone photos from my phone, I instantly realize I have to scroll past them with a little bit of embarrassment.
There’s a method to my madness. Whenever I catch myself after a workout and feel good about how I look, I snap a photo. It’s become a habit. I do not generally share them or post them to social media. In fact, this is one of the first things I will say many people get wrong. They seek out validation from other people in the hopes of changing their self-image.
That is backwards. In essence I am curating a social media feed of one (just for me). I am not seeking anyone’s validation, I am merely cataloguing my OWN validation. One of the things that many people I coach underestimate is how powerful it is to capture your own positivity. Because those positive thoughts about yourself are often fleeting!
By capturing them I make it harder for myself to forget the positive image I have of myself. That in turn creates more situations where I may validate myself.
Insecurity Can Sustainably Motivate
Another thing that people often get wrong about insecurity is that they view it as purely a problem. Negative body image is a problem because that perception feeds self-destructive behavior. But it doesn’t have to feed self-destruction. The way in which you motivate yourself from insecurity makes all the difference.
Looking back on my lower moments, I eventually had to admit something. I had a vision of how I wanted to look, and there were pathways available to get there that served me well beyond vanity. Being strong and lean was aligned with my goal to having a long healthspan, and I could do it without self-damaging behaviors.
At the core of it is something more fundamental however. When you’re at a low point, you often tell yourself a simple lie. You say “I have to do something”. You don’t. What is true is that you want to change your situation.
The difference between those two is what makes or breaks how healthy the resulting motivation is. Feeling that you “have to” or “must” do something, that compulsion will drive you beyond the point of self destruction. After all- the problem is existential so you have no choice.
Want is something else entirely. All of a sudden you are reaching ambitiously while simultaneously self-aware that nothing existential will occur if you fail.
let Positivity In
I really committed to making some changes in the summer of 2021. I was working at Jersey Wahoos at the time and we were building a dryland facility next to our pool. I knew I wanted to commit to consistently lifting weights, but I was hedging that I would wait until the facility opened to do so.
Like most building projects, things ran a bit behind schedule. I told myself that I didn’t want to wait, and so I started humbly, lifting weights on a landing overseeing the pool with a set of rusty dumbbells and a single adjustable bench.
If you’re thinking about copying my process, the following is a crucial step. If you have any success at all, chances are someone around you will notice. In my case, within a few months of starting lifting I’d catch an odd compliment, perhaps from someone who hadn’t seen me in a while.
Most people who are struggling with negativity will be uncomfortable with those compliments. In that discomfort, we will seek to dismiss them summarily in order to return to “comfort”. I have a simple phrase that you can copy or just make your version of:
“I know, right?”.
I have a story about one of the times I used this. I swear Disney had some employee training around making positive compliments to men at their parks, because when I was there in spring 2024 I had two personnel send some love my way.
One of them said to me on my way out of a Starbucks with the days necessary caffeination that my “quads were popping”.
I said “I know…right?”
And he smiled. If you’re uncomfortable with it- consider this. It takes REAL guts in 2025 to make a positive comment about someone else in public. So practice accepting it if for nothing else than to validate people who actually dare.
Remember that the negative story that you are telling yourself (most of the time) is not real life. Whatever you may think is just that- a story. Other people will offer you help in changing your narrative, and it’s up to you whether you accept it or not.
There may be people reading all of this that say to themselves “well, I don’t want to be stronger or leaner, so this message is not for me”. I don’t agree! I’m not saying to anyone else what they should want, I’m simply admitting what I want (and wanted) and how I tried to functionally motivate myself to change.
What most people get backwards about body image is that while they are struggling they imagine that they will “improve” and then they will feel good about themselves. I’m here to say that changing your narrative IS the improvement, the aesthetic difference is just a side effect.