How you think about and talk about other people’s bodies has a surprisingly big effect on how you feel about your own.

Today I have a couple of tools to help you change your relationship with your body by changing your relationship with other people’s bodies.

Body Confidence Booster #1 – Change What You See

The first trick is to increase your exposure to bodies of all shapes, sizes, abilities, and colors.

We are bombarded with images of the exact same kinds of bodies every single day: thin, white, healthy, and cisgender. We’re all taught to believe that our bodies should look like the ones we see online and in the media.

Just last week, I was on a plane and happened to be seated next to a man who was a professional photo retoucher. I wasn’t trying to be nosy, but he was working on a huge laptop screen that was right in my line of vision. For the entire flight, I watched him Photoshop models (who were already beautiful by conventional standards!). I watched him whittle their limbs and waistlines, and remove any trace of cellulite, wrinkles, or discoloration.

I even saw him Photoshop a woman’s vulva.

It was a powerful reminder to me that these ideal beauty standards we’re bombarded with on a daily basis aren’t even real.

Unless you want to live in a cave for the rest of your life, you’re not going to be able to prevent yourself from seeing thin, white, able-bodied, cisgender bodies all over the media.

But the good news is that you can make an active effort to expose yourself to more diverse bodies.

And making that effort can have a huge impact on your confidence.

A fascinating study published a few years ago showed that when women are shown pictures of other women with a wide range of different body sizes and shapes, they quickly started to feel more comfortable with and accepting of diversity in body size. They reported feeling better about their own bodies too.

When a different group of participants were shown pictures of thin bodies only, they felt more positively about thin bodies, and more judgmental and critical of their own bodies.

(The study was only done with women, but I’d be willing to guess the same results would be found across all gender identifications.)

The bottom line is this: the more body diversity you are exposed to, the more comfortable you get with body diversity.

If you make the effort to see all of the wonderfully unique bodies around you, you’ll start to appreciate your own uniqueness too!

So make an active effort to seek out more diversity in body size, skin color, ability levels, and gender identification. Here are some good resources:

9 Body Positive Social Media Campaigns That Are Changing How We Perceive Beauty.
11 Body Positive Photo Shoots And Campaigns That Made The World A More Inclusive Place.
My Body Gallery. Thousands of people have submitted real, unedited, unfiltered photographs of their own bodies. You can enter specific heights and weights to get a sense of how different bodies can look even with the same basic measurements, or you can just scroll through all of the images.

It’s really incredible to see just how unique each of our bodies are!

Body Confidence Booster #2 – Be A Well-Wisher

As you look at the people around you, I have a second trick for you.

First, think about your biggest struggle with your body. Maybe it’s believing that you’re beautiful. Maybe it’s believing that other people can be attracted to you. Try to distill it down to one sentence.

Then frame that struggle as a goal. So if you started with, “I hate how short I am,” change it to, “I wish I could see the beauty of my height.”

When you see a picture of another person’s body, or when you see another person in real life, wish for that person the same thing you wish for yourself.

So for example, if you walk by someone on the street, say to yourself, “I wish for that person to know that they are beautiful” or “I wish for that person to appreciate their quirky features.”

It’s an easy technique, but it’s amazingly effective. It’s so much easier to be kinder to other people than to ourselves, and it even brings us joy to wish good things for other people.

As you send this wish of body confidence out into the world over and over again, you’ll soon start to feel it yourself too!

As I hit publish on this blog post, I’m also sending along my wish that you can see just how beautiful, unique, and special your body is!