Why do women struggle to accept their own bodies, even when they can appreciate other women’s bodies?

Women often struggle to accept their own bodies while easily appreciating other women’s bodies because of a documented psychological process called self-objectification theory, developed by researchers Barbara Fredrickson and Tomi-Ann Roberts in 1997. The theory describes how people socialized as women are taught, often starting in early childhood, to view their own body as an object to be evaluated by others rather than as an integrated part of who they are as a person.

This socialization sets up a pursuit of an unreachable beauty standard, which produces chronic body dissatisfaction. Because the standard cannot be met, women develop coping patterns such as body checking, constant self-monitoring, and channeling their energy into other areas of achievement to compensate for what feels like a failure with their bodies. Roughly 87 percent of women in Western society report hating their bodies, a statistic that reflects a systemic pattern rather than individual failure.

Because this evaluative lens is turned inward toward the self but not necessarily outward toward other women, women can extend compassion and appreciation to other bodies while still applying a harsh, objectifying standard to their own. The self is judged through an internalized observer’s eye that other women are not subjected to in the same way.

The response to self-objectification is not learning to love one’s body, which can still keep the body positioned as something to be evaluated, but body neutrality: relating to the body as the vehicle through which a person experiences their life, rather than as an object to be judged. Moving into that relationship also requires working through resistance, most commonly rooted in fear of failure, using self-trust as the foundation for change.

Transcript

[00:00:03] Welcome to It’s Beyond The Food podcast, my sister. My name is Stephanie Dodier, and I’m gonna be your host for this episode, and today we’re gonna talk about the psychology of body acceptance. And I wanna give you some context why I’m recording this episode.

[00:00:18] It is right now today, Tuesday, August the 18th. It’s, like, l- not even 48 hours prior to releasing this ex- this episode to you guys on August the 20th, 2026. I’m recording this because one of my posts from two days ago went viral on the internet. Not on the internet, on the Instagram world. Um, and it’s still going.

[00:00:45] Right now I have gained over 1,000… Well, I’m, I’m more than that right now. Um, more than 1,000 followers in 36 hours. And you have to put this in context. Like, if you’re listening to this and you are the owner of, like, 100,000 account, like, Stephanie here has been running a business online, Beyond The Food, my company, with a tiny, tiny Instagram for the last 10 years.

[00:01:13] My account’s been live for 10 years, and it had, as of two days ago, 7,700 followers, and I’ve been running a million-dollar business with that tiny following. So contextual as that, for me to have gained 1,000 followers in less than 36 hours, it’s mind-blowing. So, um, I’m gonna link to the post that went viral, and it’s still being viral as we speak right now, because you may not be listening to this in time, so you may not see it on my feed.

[00:01:46] It was a post that I made because I’ve tried something new this weekend. So over the weekend, so call it mid-August 2026, I decided to try something called car camping. I had seen that- I discovered the concept of car camping where you go camping, but instead of being in a tent or an RV, you sleep in your car.

[00:02:10] So car camping is primarily for single people, solo people, and wildly adopted by women because it allows us to be in a secure environment. We can lock the car doors and be safe, and we can go camping on our own. Like, this… It’s a feminist thing, right? So, uh, I, uh, I discovered the hashtag car camping, I don’t know, six- four, six months ago.

[00:02:38] It came onto my feed, and I saw this woman who was car camping, and I started following the hashtag, and I discovered this whole new world. I joined some Facebook group, and again, women all over the place doing car camping. I joined some women’s group, and I decided I’m gonna do it. So I’ve been preparing for that, and I went car camping- And if you wanna know more about my experience, it’s in the famous post that went viral, and it’s the most viral I’ve ever been, and viral with the good people.

[00:03:11] So maybe you are some of those people who just discovered me because of my posts. Know that I have been semi-viral in the past, well, probably more viral than this, but with the wrong red pill people guy. Um, it’s about four years ago the last time I went viral, and I went into the manosphere, and it was nasty.

[00:03:33] I spent days blocking and deleting men who were harassing me because I was fat, and I was encouraging other women to be fat, and it’s just… It wasn’t good. So when this post started to go viral, I’m like, “Oh my God, please not that again.” And it wasn’t. I went viral with women, women 40 plus on their way towards body acceptance, on their way of, uh, letting go of diet culture, on their way of liberating themself.

[00:04:05] Like, my people I was so excited. So what I decided to do is record this episode today because the topic of that post was about what can body acceptance create in your life, which is, in my case, going car camping. And all the comments, the hundreds of comments on that post were all about women on the journey of body acceptance and, and some of them struggling with some pieces of it.

[00:04:37] So I thought, “Let me create an episode on what is never talked about,” and especially on Instagram because it’s such short pieces of content, which is my expertise, which is the psychology of body acceptance, right? We see those posts, like I did, of women liberated and doing car camping and all the things, but what did it take to get there?

[00:05:02] And what it takes to get there is not more social media posts about being in a bikini, but it’s about understanding what psychologically you need to do to move from unacceptance to acceptance, and that’s what this podcast is about. So I- it’s gonna be a very heavy teaching episode because I wanna give free resources for all of yous who are not gonna work with me, um, in either some of my programs, uh, around body acceptance or gonna coach with me if you’re a professional.

[00:05:35] If you’re doing that on your own and you don’t have the means to work with me, I wanted to give you some highlights on the various component of the journey of accepting your body and yourself. The other piece of why this podcast episode is existing is we are halfway through the Thursday sessions. So if you’re new to my world, um, in the month of August, I’m hosting weekly mini trainings for, uh, professionals, so people that are in a position of leadership with other people, be it dietician, um, health coaches, fitness coaches, therapists who are helping other people with a non-diet approach to health, helping them change their behavior, body acceptance, intuitive eating.

[00:06:27] So I’m hosting these weekly session where I’m training on different component of being a professional in that field, which is the pipeline to, uh, my non-diet coaching certification, where I train professional to teach them how to coach this way. So in the Thursday session of last week, I did a prediction that we’re about to enter in a body image crisis And because of the GLP era, because I, um, if you are new, we did a series called Beyond GLP-1 with a bunch of researchers and clinician around the side effect of GLP-1, and Reagan Chastain, uh, showed us a statistic that said that 50 to 75% of people who start a GLP-1 will drop off within one year for a multitude of reason, be it financial, they can’t afford, the insurance is not covering it anymore, side effect, because there’s a significant load of side effects, um, or not losing the weight they wanted or regaining the weight while on your GLP-1.

[00:07:36] Anyway, people are going to try GLP and leave it, and we’re gonna end up in a body image crisis because people will have lost the weight thinking it’s permanent, and then they stop the GLP, they’ll regain the weight. So I’m predicting in 2027 forward a body image crisis, and the answer is, and it’s always been body acceptance, weight acceptance.

[00:07:59] So that’s the context to why this episode. I’ve been running on for eight minutes now. I’m getting to it, I promise. That’s the context to this episode. So I’m gonna teach you body acceptance, the psychology into two part. Number one, based on research, so I’m gonna bring in a concept called the self-objectification theory, which explain scientifically why we hate our body, specifically as women, and then two, a three-step process to overcome the resistance of accepting your body, and I’m gonna teach it to you if you are a professional or if you are someone taking this journey on their own.

[00:08:40] So let’s talk about why we hate our body, right? Which is why, why a portion of people went on GLP-1, why some of us dieted for decades, and it has to do with our self-concept, how we see ourselves into the world. So comes in the self-objectification theory, which was, um- created or researched, uh, by someone named Barbara Fredrickson and Tomi-Ann Roberts in 1997, and it’s been wildly accepted as the theory that explained why women hate their body.

[00:09:20] So the self-objectification theory tells us that when a person learns in their upbringing to view themselves as a physical object first instead of being a human being first, they, they being people identified as women, land into a place of seeking to meet the standard for that object, which is their body, which we know to be the patriarchal beauty standard, and there’s, there’s the pursuit of meeting those standards set up by patriarchy.

[00:09:58] And because we don’t have a way of meeting the thin ideal or the eternal youth ideal, we’re constantly in a state of failure, and we s- we develop body dissatisfaction, which is the clinical term, or body hatred, and we develop what is known clinically as body image issue. So body image or body hatred is disproportionately experienced by women, though there’s a new trend that, uh, in the people, uh, identified as men, what is predominantly experienced is a relationship to muscularity, right?

[00:10:45] Um, so it’s not about being thin for men, it’s about being muscular, and the inability to reach that muscular state creates body image or body dissatisfaction. So it’s very gendered. A- and, and whoever you identify to the gender, you then are experiencing the variation of the self-objectification theory.

[00:11:13] Now, that… The way you learn to see yourself as an object instead of a human starts at a very young age, and that’s another psychological concept called socialization, whereas we’re… The only species, the only animal species to do that is human because we have a very evolved and complex brain. Our babies are born, we’re born, with what I call a blank computer, blank slate in your brain, and we need to load up coding in our brain to be able to survive in society.

[00:11:50] So that, it’s very simplified, but you get the idea. The concept is the process of loading up information in your brain from the age of, like, two, three years old to early 20s to become a fully functional human is called a socialization. We socialize human on many, many, many things, and one of them being their identity based on their gender And in the case of us women, because this podcast is made for women, we are socialized that we are a body and that we are existing for the gaze.

[00:12:29] In this case, predominantly, predominantly a male gaze over the body. So the reason we have a body is to be pleasing, is to be objectified as a thin youth piece of beauty, piece of meat, a- arm candy, right? That’s our… That’s the purpose of our body. And since there’s no trick, there’s no even GLP-1, which is supposedly a miracle drug to get us there, it doesn’t work, we then adopt all kinds of coping mechanism pattern.

[00:13:03] I’m gonna just give you some here, but, like, body checking, right? We’re constantly checking our body. We’re surveilling. Another thing in body image work that’s called body surveillance, where we’re constantly surveilling, surveilling our body. So in the case of weight, we’re constantly monitoring our weight on the scale.

[00:13:26] We’re monitoring what we eat, which I’m not gonna talk about it today, but then creates eating disturbance and disordered eating, eating disorder. So we’re constantly surveilling, checking, assessing. And because most of us are not able to reach this ideal beauty, we have all kinds of coping mechanism in other areas of our life to feel, quote, good enough because we can’t make it with our body.

[00:13:58] So it- I’ll take me for an example. I overachieve in my career. I overachieve trying to buy the bigger house, the most expensive car, make as much money, become the president of my company, and all the things. Um, some women I work with, it’s their career. Others, it’s their people-pleasing as a mother. Uh, so there’s all kinds of pattern we adopt to offset the fact we cannot meet the beauty ideal.

[00:14:29] That’s how self-objectification plays out, and that’s why in an outrageous amount, the latest statistic I saw was from two years ago, 87% of women in Western society hate their body. Like, they self-describe as hating their body, wanting to change it, and actively taking measure to change it, be it dieting, food, cosmetic, surgery, makeup, all the things.

[00:15:02] So that’s why we don’t accept our body and hate our body. So what do we do with this, right? What do we do with this body hatred? Now, most of us, and the kind of people I work with, we were in that pattern, and if you’re likely listening to this podcast, you were in that pattern for most of us decade, decades, uh, until somehow, somewhere you come across the word body acceptance, anti-diet, intuitive eating, maybe some feminist book, and you’re like, “What is that?”

[00:15:43] Right? I don’t have to be thin. I have the right to exist without trying to be thinner. And it’s just like, it breaks something in your brain bec- the… What it breaks is your socialization, right? Many women will describe to me, like, “I still remember the day when I came across blah blah blah’s book, and it was like a, a nervous shock, like a nervous system shock that I could be living without this.”

[00:16:15] So each one of us has different story, and we come to that point where we say, “Okay, I can do something else.” Now, that something else, in my world, we call it body neutrality, right? So I help women, I teach professional to move people from body hatred to the first stage, which is called body neutrality. The…

[00:16:45] My definition of body neutrality, because there is no, uh, s- theory on body neutrality, although I do have some colleagues right now that are putting some academics, colleagues, that are writing books about body neutrality, that are creating a evidence-based process to demonstrate the evidence of body neutrality.

[00:17:11] So stay tuned. In the next, I predict in the next five, 10 years, we will have a theory around body neutrality, um, and, uh, things are gonna evolve very quickly, and I think GLP-1 will trigger more evolution on that. But I’ll leave that aside. Body neutrality is when we resocialize ourselves that our body is not for the male gaze, but instead for us to experience our life.

[00:17:46] Right? So my main intentional thought that I give to my client is my body is a tool, is the vehicle by which I will experience my life. So think of it as our senses, right? Our body is the machine, is the vehicle by which we can see the world, we can hear the world, we can smell the world, we can taste the world, we can be touched by the world.

[00:18:16] All of those senses that allows us to experience the world, the human experience, is all experienced via our body. And to me, that’s the purpose of a body. That’s why we have a body. Therefore, we need to shift out of the socialization, we need to shift our belief system that as a woman, my body is for other people to gaze.

[00:18:46] It’s for other people to value me, right? It’s for me to work and spend all my energy, my time, my resources to try to meet an ideal that patriarchy told me I needed to look like So the foundation of body neutrality is the self-objectification theory. It’s a response to that, and it’s the, um, re-socialization of ourselves as women of why we had a body.

[00:19:17] So it, it is not s- the body neutrality is not about loving yourself and loving your body because, in fact, if you aim to love your body, you still are trapped into this idea that the reason you have a body is to be loved, but this time it’s to be loved by yourself instead of male, which is, which is gonna produce, again, a problem long term when the body doesn’t behave the way you want it to be, and you’re going to have dissatisfaction again.

[00:19:46] So we completely shift the entire belief system around why we have a body. And truth to be told, it’s a, it’s based in feminist theory, right? When, because when we start understanding that the beauty standard are created by patriarchy, we have no other choice but to respond to that with feminist principle, right?

[00:20:10] Because otherwise… And, and that’s why I find I have a lot of criticism around body love. If you’ve been a listener of the podcast, you heard me talk about that for years. Bo- #bodypositivity for me was a real problem. I never adopted it, never supported it, because it was a, a response that still put patriarchy in a position of power over our body, still trying to love our body.

[00:20:41] So I have a unique framework called body neutrality, and that is my response to self-objectification theory when we shift the entire belief system. So some of you may be there, right? You’ve heard me talk, or you’ve heard some of my colleague talk about body neutrality, perhaps you read some book, and then you start doing the work.

[00:21:03] And for some of you, the work will stop here, like, “What the heck just happened?” Right? Socialization and objectification theory, and I’ve never heard of that. That is your lesson for today. Like, if you never heard this narrative before, stop the podcast here. And then perhaps go listen to other of my podcasts.

[00:21:23] The rest of the podcast today is gonna be about you knew that already, and now you’re actively working towards body acceptance, which is the vast majority of people who are now following me on Instagram from two days ago are people on their journey towards body acceptance. They found my posts to be very inspiring, to be very, um, helpful to them because they’re, quote, struggling in their journey of body acceptance.

[00:21:53] So I wanna give that crowd of you, um, and this is gonna be really particular for a professional if you’re listening to me, how do we move through the resistance that all of us are experiencing, that your clients have experienced in the process of, accepting your body? The first thing that we do, step one, is name the resistance.

[00:22:18] So if you are experiencing something that you describe as a struggle, as a resistance, as difficult, as challenging, that’s a resistance. So let’s name it. I am experiencing resistance in the journey of accepting my body. Nothing has gone wrong. That’s the key here. Resistance is part of transformation. When we’re trying to change anything, th- we have to move through a phase of resistance.

[00:22:54] So it’s totally normal to experience resistance. So in the coaching world, we call that normalizing. So we are normalizing naming the resistance. Nothing has gone wrong. The next question is to ask ourselves why am I resisting? What am I resisting? When I ask this question to people and when my trainee asks that to their client, there’s a couple things that come up.

[00:23:22] I’m gonna talk about the two main things that come up. Number one is I’m afraid to gain weight. Okay, let’s work through that. So for the intent of this podcast, that’s the prior episode on my feed, right? The fear of weight gain. So go there. Not gonna talk about that today. What do we do with the fear of weight gain?

[00:23:44] I’m gonna go with the other piece that usually come up, the top two reason why people resist body acceptance, which is the fear of failure. So the fear of failure is what we experience when we don’t trust ourselves in the process of resistance. The fear of failure is not like failing a grade at school.

[00:24:12] We are afraid that if we move through further into the process of body acceptance and we change our belief system, that we, quote, “May not treat ourselves well as we struggle. We may not meet ourselves with compassion. We probably will criticize ourselves through the process, and we will, we will not get…”

[00:24:40] Whatever there is for you, we will not gere- get there at all fast enough in the right way that you’re imagining it to be. So you have a fear of failing And it’s something that as women who have been through what I call diet trauma, right, the trauma of cycling in and out of dieting, of losing, gaining, losing, gaining, and constantly failing at the process of trying to shrink your body, you have a lot of experience in.

[00:25:11] You have a lot of, “I failed before at this thing with my body,” and we go back into the experience of dieting. We’re like, “Oh my God, like this whole changing my body and now trying to accept my body, I’ve never been successful before. Why would I be this time?” And before you’re like, “Oh no, that’s not me. I know that’s not dieting.”

[00:25:32] Uh-uh, that’s not how the brain and the nervous system works, people. If you’re trying to accept your body after 20 years of dieting, the only reference point your brain and your nervous system has is the diet cycle. So your brain will leech on, will like grasp on your prior experience of trying to change your relationship to your body, unfortunately, that was dieting and getting thinner, to process the experience of now accepting your body.

[00:26:08] And every time you failed in the past with dieting, I’m pretty sure none of you were really nice with your body and with yourself. I know I wasn’t. It was months of shaming myself, criticizing myself, treating myself really badly for not having been successful at shrinking my body. So when I first went on the journey of trying to accept my body, the only reference point my brain and my nervous system had was what I did for 25 years.

[00:26:39] So that is likely why you’re resisting and you are afraid of failing, because you do not have a reference point in your past experience of having changed your relationship to your body that actually, quote, ‘worked’. So you’re fearing failing again. So how do we overcome that? The big solution to the fear of failure is self-trust, right?

[00:27:11] It’s a- an ability to trust ourselves to achieve our goal, to get through the resistance, to be nice to ourselves, to be kind, to be patient, trusting that who we are is capable of doing this work Now, self-trust is, again, based on social conditioning, not something that most of us have been socialized to. We have been socialized to not trust ourselves, particularly not trust our body, that we weren’t good enough unless we achieved the body, and because we weren’t able to achieve the body, we shouldn’t be trusted.

[00:27:56] And because we constantly fail through the years of dieting, we have another proof that we cannot trust ourselves. Now, this is where the world of coaching comes in. So if you are a woman working herself through the journey of accepting her body, you can hire someone to hold your hand through the process of learning to accept your body.

[00:28:20] This is what the world of coaching does for you. It holds your hand when things gets challenging, when things… When you hit resistance, when you can’t trust yourself, that’s what a coach does for you. It holds your hand through the process when things get difficult.

[00:28:37] It moves you back into the world of trying, helps you build self-trust. And if you are a professional listening to that, that’s what your role is. That’s what I train you to do in my programs If for all the good reasons in the world you cannot ha- don’t have the resources to have a professional coach hold your hand in the process of building self-trust, of moving through resistance and failure, here’s a solution for you that you c- kind of steps you can want to or would work your way through to replace the hand-holding of the coach that you could hire.

[00:29:20] So what a coach does for you is it holds, number one, a compassionate space of leadership. That’s what a coach does. A coach does… It sets the goals to work with you. Say, okay, you wanna get to a place of body acceptance, that’s the goal. I’m gonna lead you through the steps of body neutrality of the process, and I’m gonna lead you through this compassionately, holding safe space, being kind, and, and so forth with you.

[00:29:51] So if you wanna do this work on your own, you have to, to develop compassionate self-leadership. You have to become the leader of yourself, not in a mean, bitchy, punishing, critical way, and that’s the, that’s the challenge here, right? Is to become, to have a voice in yourself, in your own mind of compassion, kindness, acceptance, to lead you through the resistance and the fear of failure.

[00:30:26] Okay? That’s probably the biggest piece. Now, there’s another program that I run year, from year to year to year called, um, self-coaching, right? So that could be a… That’s a tool you can learn to coach yourself at the mental and the nervous system level to do this work. The second thing you will need to do and learn to do is to create internal safety So internal safety is the ability to create the safety emotion within you in order for you to try things that are outside your comfort zone.

[00:31:11] So I’ll give you a classic example of that is in the body image world, body neutrality, one of the piece of work we do is to dress your body comfortably. So this could be buying some clothes to fit your body, but also wearing clothes that you’ve restrained yourself from wearing in the past. So you have to take very uncomfortable steps to wear clothes that felt really uncomfortable before.

[00:31:41] Could be a body comp dress, it could be, um, sleeveless shirt, it could be wearing shorts. You have to move yourself Into doing those things. And the way to lead yourself to do this is, is the ability to create internal safety, because most women have a challenge with that because the only way we know to create safety is through others, right?

[00:32:08] Um, this is the work of self-worth, self-esteem, safety. We lean on other people’s opinion of us, we lean into the male gaze to create a value for ourselves and to feel safe. So we have to relearn to do that. That’s step number two. And step number three is having a consensual relationship with yourself, or what I call self-consent.

[00:32:36] So you will notice yourself, uh, uh, many people when I hear them talk about body accep- acceptance, they’ll say to me something like this, tell me if that’s you, um, “I have to push myself to do this. I have to push myself to wear the shorts.” This whole concept of pushing yourself, ’cause you don’t trust yourself to do the thing if you’re not aggressively pushing yourself.

[00:33:04] That is the world of what I call I have to versus I choose to. So consensual relationship with yourself is asking yourself, “Do I wanna do this?” And being open to the answer, no, I don’t wanna do this, and yes, I wanna do this. So one of the question that I like to put in front of people when they begin their work of body image is, are you consenting to potentially gaining weight?

[00:33:36] And if you’re… If the answer is no, I don’t consent, I wanna do body image work, but I don’t consent into gaining weight, th- then my answer is, don’t do body image work because you’re not ready. You have to be at a space. Don’t push yourself to do body acceptance work if you’re not ready to be open to the possibility of gaining weight.

[00:34:02] If it’s like, if it’s a hardcore no, you’re just not ready. Continue, I don’t know, to diet, to self-surveil, to objectify your body because you’re just not ready. That’s a consensual relationship with yourself. Now, most people say, “Well, Stephanie, I’ll never be willing to do that.” I’m not saying to be willing, to be open to the possibility you may gain weight and that’s the price you’re willing to pay to be at peace with your body.

[00:34:32] But most important, to ask yourself that question, to sit with yourself in silence and ask yourself that question. And I’m telling you, the answer you will get will surprise you. In my coaching, or when professional coach under my methodology, they’ll ask that to their client. They’ll just ask the question, go silent and wait for the answer That’s what I want you to do with yourself.

[00:34:59] I want you to replace the coach who would ask you that question, and then see what your answer is. So those are the three step. Um, I’ll repeat again, compassionate self-leadership, inner safety, and a consensual relationship or self-consent. These are the three step to be able to move yourself and also to identify why you’re stuck.

[00:35:22] For all of those who are saying, “I’m stuck in body image, body acceptance,” identify which element of it you’re stuck. You can go back on my podcast feed, this episode on each one of those things. You can read books. Uh, you can perhaps keep watching for… I have different program that comes at different time of the year.

[00:35:44] You don’t have to hire me as a one-on-one coach or hire one of my client. There’s lower, uh, kind of, um, container that you can come into to help you move through those three elements. And if you are a professional and you’re not nodding your head to like, “Oh yeah, I know how to help my client with safety. I know how to help my client with consent,” and all of this, then the gateway for you is the non-diet coaching certification, so where I teach you how to coach yourself with that first and then to lend that to other human being.

[00:36:19] So I’ve been talking for 37 minutes. I usually do under 30 minutes podcast, so I’m gonna end it here. Um, you kinda got your next step, um, either to work with me, join my email list to know some of the program we’re currently enrolling in the non-diet coaching certification for 2026, uh, so if that’s calling your name.

[00:36:44] And then stay tuned in the fall. I’m gonna for sure open one of my, body image acceptance coaching program to help some of you. It was a pleasure being with you. Welcome to my world if you’re new. Thank you for all the OGs that have been here for over 10 years listening to the podcast. If you, you’re part of the 1.4 million download that we have, thank you for being here, and I’ll see you next week.

[00:37:13] I love you, my sisters. Bye.

[00:37:19] wanna coach behaviors, not bodies. Learn the mindset tool and the method that create real changes.

[00:37:26] Join the wait list for the next cohort of the non diet coaching certification at stephaniedodier.com/waitlist. That’s where the real training begins, and I’ll see you on the other side, my sisters.