Body Dysmorphia

This is something that a lot of people have a lot of trouble understanding if they have never experienced it themselves, and something I have gotten a lot of questions about. For those of you who don't know, body dysmorphia is basically a condition where an individual sees their body, or often a specific part of their body, in a skewed way, and it is very common in eating disordered individuals (though it also appears in other individuals with things like face, hair, and so forth).

For example, the most common one for people with eating disorders is "I'm fat". With me it's "I'm fat, my thighs are fat, and my stomach is huge." Now, I won't say numbers or BMI or anything like that, but I know that I am a far cry from being fat. So how does this work?

My mo calls it my circus mirror, so like I look in the mirror and actually see something physiologically different, but I don't think this is the case. I think I see me the way everyone else sees me, and my brain just translates it differently.

For example, I do not see myself as being OVERWEIGHT. Fat and overweight are not the same thing in my head. I just see the fat on my body and believe there is more fat there than there should be and that I am not what I should be (my mom says "what fat?").

I don't know if that makes any sense or not. I'm probably just confusing you guys more. If that's the case, then I'm sorry. It's kinda hard to explain.

People also ask if I see other people my size as fat, and this is a huge resounding NO. I don't look at other people and judge them and hold them to the same standards I hold myself to. If I saw someone else my size, I would most likely think they were quite skinny. But somehow, I don't think I"m skinny.

Like I said, it's not a physiological problem with your eyes. It's a psychological problem with your perception. And your perception of yourself is what is skewed.

We are perfectionists and we hold ourselves to these perfectionistic standards. And if we fall short, it is fat. Fat is not simply a physical state of being, it's an abstract concept that includes the ideas of unsuccessfulness, worthlessness, hate, lack of control, and emotional volatility in addition to the presence of excess matter (i'll talk about the absence of matter vs "being skinny" in another post). Fat is not simply a high BMI.

And in body dysmorphia, how your body presents itself to you says that you are too "fat".