Body checking: the verdict you deliver every morning
Scales, mirrors, waistbands, pinching, photographs. Checking is meant to give you information about your body. What it gives you is a judgement, and the judgement runs the day.
The scales first, before anything else. Then the mirror, from the side, breathing in. The waistband of the jeans that are the test. A pinch at the hip. Later, a photograph, examined for how the arm looks, compared with last month's. By the time you have left the house, a verdict has been delivered, and whichever way it went, it is running the rest of the day.
Body checking is the part of disordered eating that looks most like ordinary self-awareness, and it is one of the parts doing the most harm. I want to explain why, and what changes when it stops.
What checking is for
You check to know where you stand. The idea is that the number, the reflection, the fit will tell you something true, and that knowing it will let you relax, or will tell you what to do. It is a reasonable idea, but it is not what checking does.
What checking does is deliver a verdict. If the number is down, there is a moment of safety, immediately followed by the fear of losing it and the tightening of the rules to protect it. If the number is up, the day is ruined, the rules tighten anyway, and the restriction that produces the next binge begins. Either way, the checking does not settle anything. It sets the terms for the day, and the terms are always anxious.
Why it gets worse, not better
Checking has the same structure as checking in OCD, which is why, as an OCD specialist, I recognise it so readily. A doubt arrives: have I changed, is it bad. Something is done to resolve it: the scales, the mirror. The relief is brief. And the doubt returns, because bodies fluctuate constantly and the checking has just taught you that the fluctuation matters.
The more you check, the more sensitive you become to tiny variations that mean nothing, and the more each variation feels like it means everything. A body weighed daily produces daily crises. A mirror examined from the side, breathing in, in unforgiving light, produces something to worry about every time, because any body, examined that way, will.
The comparison
Alongside the checking of your own body there is usually checking against others. The person opposite at the table, the stranger in the street, the images on your phone. This is checking too, and it has the same effect: the search always finds someone, and the someone becomes the standard for the day.
Retiring the check
In the CBT work I do here, checking gets retired gradually, as experiments rather than as an act of will. What actually happens if the scales stay in the cupboard for a week? What happens on a day you do not look from the side? The first thing most people discover is how much anxiety was being generated by the checking itself, because when it stops, the daily verdict stops with it, and the day gets to start without one.
The second thing they discover is that the information was never useful. Nothing you needed to do with your body depended on a daily number. What the number did was decide how you felt about yourself before you had done anything, and that is a job it should never have had.
What we do not do
There is no weighing in my sessions, no meal plan and no food diary you have to hand over. That work belongs with a specialist team and a dietitian, and if your weight is significantly low or falling, if you are purging, or if your physical health is affected, that is where I will point you. What I work on is the thinking, the rules and the behaviours around eating, and checking is one of the central ones.
What the goals look like
The goals people bring here are almost never about a number. They are about getting dressed without a verdict, eating a meal without arithmetic, going a whole day without the question. Once the checking stops delivering the daily judgement, those goals come within reach, and they tend to arrive before people would describe themselves as feeling better about their bodies, which is the order it usually goes in.
If the scales are the first thing you touch in the morning, there is more on how I work with disordered eating, and checking is often where we start.