Hope for Women with Body Image Issues

If you’re a woman, I’m guessing you’ve been unhappy with your appearance at some point in your life. From wanting to lose a few pounds to feeling deep dissatisfaction and even disgust with how we look, body image issues bother many women like mosquitoes on a camping trip at best and can become utterly debilitating—even overlapping with and feeding sexual sin.

A Girl’s Story

At nine years old, Rosie loved hot summer days in her small farming town. She read books in her favorite tree, watched “The Little Mermaid” on repeat, and ran around barefoot, hopping on tip-toes across scorching sidewalks to land on grass. Summer brought ice cream, camping trips, and, best of all, swimming. Rosie begged her mom for permission to run across the street and swim at Shannon’s house almost every day. The girls played Marco Polo and sharks and minnows and pretended to be synchronized swimmers. They flipped their hair up and out of the water like Ariel, sending sprays of glittering drops across the pool’s cement edge. Freckles blossomed across Rosie’s shoulders and tan lines crisscrossed her back.

At thirteen, Rosie was a bookworm and musician. She was terrible at sports and avoided swimming at all costs. If she couldn’t get out of a swim party, she covered her swimsuit with a large tee-shirt and sometimes shorts. She constantly compared herself to her friends, seeing hips that were too large, a chest that was too small, and cottage cheese thighs. She wore oversized tee-shirts and long, flowing skirts—partly because she had a naïve adoration of hippie culture, but mainly because she could hide in the abundant fabric.

As a nineteen-year-old, Rosie hovered around ten pounds heavier than she wanted to be. Still, she was happy and active in college. She enjoyed taking dance classes—African-Caribbean, salsa, line dance, ballroom—but avoided ballet because of the tights and leotards. She often turned to the Lord in repentance and prayer, wanting to be less concerned with her appearance. She saw the vanity in her heart and prayed for “the imperishable beauty of a gentle and quiet spirit, which in God’s sight is very precious” (1 Pet. 3:4b).

At 25, Rosie was about to get married. She longed to share sexual intimacy with her husband but dreaded the exposure. Though she wasn’t overweight and had youth on her side, by now she was used to feeling unhappy about her body. She figured her best bet was to try not to think about it. She didn’t realize that her body image issues would become a burden for her husband, too—that every time he told her, “You look beautiful” and she responded in disbelief, he felt dismissed.

Can you relate to Rosie’s story? I can. I know how persistent this problem is, because it’s been my problem. Where can women go, what can we do, to find freedom from this underlying, nagging discontent?

Body Image Issues and Self-Focus

Body image problems can and do trouble women and girls of all ages, especially in our sexualized and social media-moderated society. Feelings of despair, worthlessness, and envy (among other things) can be crippling. We’d love to feel happy about how we look but instead feel stuck in imperfection. We buy the wrinkle cream, avoid carbs, and walk our 10,000 daily steps, and while those things may be healthy, they may also be driven by a relentless discontentment, an excessive focus on self.

This self-preoccupation is different from the proper desire to take care of our bodies and present ourselves appropriately. No, these painful feelings come from continually worrying about how we think we look, how others might think we look, and how, in our minds, we fail to measure up to some standard. Maybe it’s a standard that’s unrealistic, or dangerous . . . or maybe the standard is impossible.

Counselor and author Julie Lowe describes body image issues as being like walking around constantly holding a mirror in front of one’s face—and worse, it’s a distorted mirror.^[1] We’re not seeing ourselves clearly. On top of that, we’re caring far too much about the impact we have on those around us: Do they think we’re attractive, smart, capable? In our self-focus, we’re not only bowing to our own false image,^[2] but we want everyone else to worship us, too.

The Slavery of Self-Worship

Body image issues feel enslaving because they are enslaving. Wives enduring sexual betrayal and women caught up in sexual sin are often plagued with body image issues, too. For a hurting wife, her struggle may orbit around a lie: “If I was more attractive, my husband would not have betrayed me.”^[3] For a woman struggling with sexual sin, the lie may be related to the bodies she’s seen in pornography or her longing for a relationship that seems out of her grasp because she believes she’s not attractive enough. Whatever the situation, a discontented heart seeks to provide for itself the comfort, satisfaction, or hope that can only come from the one true God.

Sisters, this hits hard, I know. I prefer to think of my discontentment as a superficial annoyance, something bothersome but common . . . a “respectable sin.” But hope won’t come from glossing over the reality of my heart’s condition. John Calvin was right when he wrote, “man’s nature . . . is a perpetual factory of idols.”^[4] David Powlison talked about how worshipping our own image leads to an “anxious, fearful, hidden existence.”^[5]

But facing our false worship is not the end-game. No, the point of seeing and confessing sin is to be pressed into repentance, which flowers into joy. Repentance is about turning. We turn our eyes away from ourselves and set them on Christ. In him, freedom from body image issues is possible.

In the Beginning: Guilt, Awareness, and Hiding

Part of our longing for a bodily ideal must be an echo of the truth that our bodies were created perfect. God formed Adam and Eve as the pinnacle of his creation, which he declared “very good” (Gen. 1:26–31).

But after Adam and Eve rebelled against God, “the eyes of both were opened, and they knew that they were naked. And they sewed fig leaves together and made themselves loincloths” (Gen. 3:7). God’s first people went from a state of joyful innocence and lack of shame to a sudden awareness of and desperation to cover their nakedness, to hide.

Body image issues are not a modern phenomenon—they stretch as far back as the garden of Eden. In behavior we can all recognize, Adam and Eve then tried to protect and cover themselves. Of course, it didn’t work; they needed God to cover them. Blood flowed in the garden as God sacrificed part of his good creation, using animal skins to cover their shame (Gen. 3:21). But that covering was only a temporary sign pointing to Jesus, whose sacrifice would clothe God’s children in Christ’s eternal righteousness.

In the End: Judgment, Glory, and Joy

The final day of judgment will be a day of exposure and reckoning, when “we will all stand before the judgment seat of God” (Rom. 14:10–12) and “no creature is hidden from his sight, but all are naked and exposed to the eyes of him to whom we must give account” (Heb. 4:13).

Terrifying! This is worse than the worst ‘naked-in-a-public-place’ dream ever . . . unless we belong to Jesus. The very next verse says, “Since then we have a great high priest who has passed through the heavens, Jesus, the Son of God, let us hold fast our confession” (Heb. 4:14). Jesus sympathizes with our weaknesses and has “in every respect” been tempted just like us. But where we fall to temptation, Jesus stood firm, and his righteousness counts for us.

Think about the eternal Son—mighty, resplendent, beautiful. “He is the image of the invisible God . . . he is before all things, and in him all things hold together” (Col. 1:15–16). And yet, “being found in human form, he humbled himself by becoming obedient to the point of death, even death on a cross” (Phil. 2:8). He had “no form or majesty that we should look at him, and no beauty that we should desire him.” He was “despised and rejected by men” (Phil. 2:8, Isa. 53:2b, 3a) and hung naked, exposed, nailed to the cross. Because Jesus’s body was broken, our bodies can be raised, glorified, and perfected.

Sisters, when we stand before God on that great last day, we will be open and exposed before the Judge. But—imagine it!—we will be free of shame, covered and beautified by the perfection of Jesus.

Freedom from Body Image Issues

The point isn’t about feeling better or worse about ourselves. No, freedom comes with forgetting ourselves.^[6] Freedom comes when we’re captivated by the love of our Savior and the reality that we are his and he is ours, forever.

Your heart can rest from fretfulness and despair when the King of Kings has chosen you and treasures you as his beloved bride. Like a daffodil opening in the sun, let the warmth of Jesus’s love open your heart and fix your mind on his beauty.

Jesus is tenderly sympathetic . . . and blindingly holy. The light of who we really are in him and the astounding depth of his love for us throws our body image issues into inconsequential shadow. If you’re following Jesus, what you look like no longer defines you. Jesus’s righteousness covers you. You are a woman in Christ. You are his beloved—forever chosen, forever treasured.

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^[1] Julie Lowe, “Teens and Body Image,” December 2, 2018, CCEF  https://www.ccef.org/teens-and-body-image/

^[2] David Powlison, https://www.ccef.org/podcast/body-image-distortions/

^[3] Hope in Your Heartbreak: First Steps for Sexually Betrayed Wives addresses deceitful thoughts like these, and much more.

^[4] Calvin’s Institutes, 1.11.8; https://tabletalkmagazine.com/article/2023/08/the-heart-is-an-idol-factory/

^[5] David Powlison, https://www.ccef.org/podcast/body-image-distortions/

^[6] For more on this, see Timothy Keller’s small book, The Freedom of Self-Forgetfulness.