What is body checking? And how to stop doing it.
Let's talk about body checking: the compulsive need to examine your shape, your weight, and particular parts of your body. We all glance in the mirror now and then. Body checking is when that glancing tips over into something frequent, anxious, and hard to stop.
It can look like stepping on the scale every morning, taking photos of yourself from the same angles, pinching at your stomach or arms, scanning your reflection in shop windows as you walk down the street, or comparing one part of your body to how it looked yesterday. It isn't casual. It's a repetitive, often hidden habit, and it can have a real effect on your mental health.
Why we body check
Body checking is rarely about vanity, and it almost never starts with the body. Underneath it is usually a much older feeling: of being unseen, not quite good enough, or not safe. When an emotional need hasn't been met, for reassurance, for control, for the sense that we matter: the discomfort doesn't disappear. It looks for somewhere to go. For many people, it lands on the body.
Checking becomes a way to cope with that discomfort. It's a misguided attempt to soothe yourself, to reassure yourself that you're okay, that you're in control, that you know what's "wrong" and therefore what to "fix." If you grew up feeling you had to earn love or attention through how you looked or what you achieved, the body can become the place you go to feel momentarily validated.
Just like a band-aid over a deep wound, body checking doesn't heal what's underneath. It only quiets it for a moment.
The cycle it creates
Here's the painful part: checking rarely makes you feel better for long. Each time you check, it tends to go one of two ways.
- You feel more anxious about how you look, so you check again, hoping for a different answer.
- You feel a brief flicker of relief, but it fades fast, leaving you wanting to check again to get it back.
Either way, the checking feeds itself. What started as a way to feel more in control ends up controlling you. The more you do it, the more trapped you feel, caught in a loop of monitoring and judging your own body.
How to begin stopping
You don't break this habit by white-knuckling your way through it or shaming yourself for doing it. You break it by getting curious about what it's really for. A few gentler starting points:
- Notice the trigger, not just the behaviour. When you catch yourself checking, pause and ask: what was I feeling a moment before? Anxious? Unseen? Out of control? The check is usually answering an emotional question, not a physical one.
- Name the real need. If the feeling underneath is "I need to know I'm okay," checking your stomach won't meet that. Ask what actually would, reassurance from someone you trust, rest, or simply acknowledging the feeling.
- Make checking a little harder. Cover or move a mirror, put the scale away, change the route that passes the reflective window. You're not failing if you still want to check, you're just adding a pause.
- Be kind about the slips. This is a coping mechanism that once protected you. Loosening its grip takes time, and self-criticism only feeds the cycle.
Body checking is, at its heart, an attempt to fill an emotional gap. Recognising that connection, that it's about unmet needs far more than it's about your body, is what makes it possible to start meeting those needs in ways that actually help.
This essay was first published on my newsletter. Read the original on Substack →