'Today' Show Talks Body Image, How To Suppress Negative Thoughts

Have you criticized your body today?

If you answered "yes," you are not alone. A new poll by Glamour has found that a whopping 97 percent of women experience "I hate my body" thoughts daily.

Glamour has seen firsthand how great the demand is for healthy body image to be represented in the media, yet women are still struggling to silence their inner critics.

Cindi Leive, Glamour's editor in chief, spoke with Meredith Vieira on this morning's "Today" show to talk about the troubling statistics.

The magazine found that "on average, women have 13 negative body thoughts daily." Leive points out that that is almost "one for every waking hour." The level of criticism women hurl at themselves is "brutal." She worries, "If a man talked this way to a woman, it would be considered relationship abuse. But it's somehow become acceptable for us to talk this way, with this kind of venom to ourselves."

Why is this? Ann Kearney-Cooke, Ph.D., a psychologist who contributed to the study, offers one possible reason: women often use their body as "a screen" onto which they "project negative feelings."

Problems at work or in a relationship have a way of showing up as negative thoughts about the body. This is why Kearney-Cooke and Leive suggest that when women notice that they are obsessing or thinking hateful thoughts about their body, they ask themselves, "Is this really about my body?"

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Comments

[impatient]

12:13 AM on 02/23/2011

well yeah, women are hard on themselves when it comes to body image---but it's men, not women, who drive that. Men i have been dating have told me "sorry---there's no chemistry"---and imply i am too fat and ugly to make love to. I have asked the question---why does what i ook ike make a difference in why you'd want to make love to me, when for me it's all about who you are and not what you look like? All men love porn now, watch it every day and are now becoming more and moire narrow in what they consider "f*&kable.".

Women internalize what they're told---by a porn industry, by men and by externally imposed standards of beauty. Don't make it seem iike women are weak or stupid for doing this....

[GQTaste]

07:27 PM on 02/24/2011

No, it's not men who give women a hard time as much as other women do. Men like women just the way they are. It's when you get other women, who want to compete w/ other women w/ their bodies. Of course there's not straight men too that don't help w/ women.