Building A Healthy Body Image In The Slave

I recently responded to a question regarding the issue of Body Image in a slave. It was asked how do Dominants deal with the issue of a slave with an inaccurate Body Image, and what steps we as Doms would take to help her refine her Body Image into a more accurate representation, and / or what Doms can do to align the slave’s self-perceptions with the perceptions of their Dom / Owner / Master? Truth is that Body Image issues are much more widely prevalent than most people think (as I illustrate below), and helping anyone’s Body Image become more accurate takes time, diligent effort, and patience. It can border on Deep Psychology, and as readers of The Crow Academy materials know, I do not believe that a Master should act as his slave’s full-time therapist on serious issues requiring professional counseling. Nonetheless, most people CAN work with their Body Image without needing professional counseling.

The Good News is that given a slave who understands and respects the need for change and an improved Body Image, there ARE a handful of things a Master can do for a slave. Positive reinforcement, a fitness program, and choosing the right way to measure results all can help create a more balanced perception in the mind of the slave. I give a few techniques and examples below, as well as some overall advice on how to build a healthier Body Image. Don’t worry about how long it takes. What counts is that valuable steps are taken to intelligently re-align the slave’s perception for an honest and balanced sense of self-appreciation. The resulting good habits in turn will benefit her throughout her life.

Enjoy.

Lets start by defining Body Image as absolutely NOT the same thing as Fitness Level. Fitness Level is clearly measurable – BMI Index, height-weight ratio, body fat percentage, blood pressure, pulse rate, etc etc etc. All completely measurable & 100% OBJECTIVE.

Body Image is completely Subjective, perhaps even the very essence of Subjectivity, i.e. literally at the core of our own, personal perception.

To be with a slave who has an accurate body image makes my life as her Master 1000 times easier, whether or not she is in perfect physical shape. The body’s fitness level can be easily adjusted with good habits and a fitness regimen. We as Doms can help our slave get into a good fitness routine. BODY IMAGE on the other hand, being something deep inside the black box of the individual’s mind, can take an extraordinary amount of investigation to discern if the body image is accurate or not, and getting it to align accurately if it is incongruous can be an uphill battle.

Let me quickly point out something that many, many people fail to realize: Body Image issues are NOT limited to women. Not even remotely! The media LOVES to publish articles about women and body image, but the truth is that men suffer from it just as much, although we express it differently. I am going to use myself as an example:
I am in very good shape. I know this because of how much I work out and what I can do.
THAT SAID, when I look in a mirror, I tend to see myself as relatively Thinner and Smaller than I actually am (yes I know an odd inversion of the typical body image issue, but actually pretty common in men). People throughout my life for the last 20 years have told me that I can be a very large, intimidating, and imposing man. When I went to sit in a Mazda Miata I found that I could not fit in the car because my broad shoulders rubbed against the window. I KNOW conceptually from outside feedback that I am a big guy… I KNOW this intellectually… Nonetheless, to this day when I look in a mirror I still tend to see myself as only a mildly above-average build at the least. Whenever I see a gigantic muscle bound dude at the gym I always feel smaller than said fellow… even when I literally have a beautiful woman tell me in that exact moment that I am almost the same size as that guy. It’s like my mind seems to have a mechanism that at least partially rejects the information even though it computes perfectly logically with outside confirmation from a positive source. Weird huh?!?!

My point is that my own attempts to understand body image within myself have shown me that its a very weird world of information filtering, and even pure logic and external confirmation might do very little, and that seems to be regardless of how open one is to changing oneself to have an accurate self-image. Working with my own self-perception and trying to gain an accurate Body Image has entailed a variety of visualization techniques wherein I literally re-train my inner eye to perceive myself more accurately. Thus I understand the internal fine-tuning that must occur when others have a distorted Body Image.

It therefore follows suit that when I have a slave who has an inaccurate body image, I am more patient with her as I understand the complexity of that information filtering and distortion. My current slave is gorgeous by any standards, yet even she will nearly daily point out what’s wrong with her body. It got to the point where I had to forbid any and all forms of self-deprecation on her part, with potential punishment for transgression. That said, I also often simply do not acknowledge her self-deprecation. For example, if she says, “my thighs are big” (they are FINE) then I might say in that man-cannot-be-bothered-he’s-reading-the-newspaper voice, “thats nice dear” – LOL. Still I sometimes have to remind her there is a “no self-deprecating” rule in my house. Sometimes I think the best thing we can do as Doms is simply not give energy to self-deprecation on the part of the slave. Since I began the latter policy my slave does in fact self-deprecate less. Another alternative is to immediately shift the focus onto healthy ideas and forward-moving fitness options, devoid of any negative context.

I think regular positive reinforcements about the good qualities of the slave, and especially things you like about a slave’s body are important, though it should not be allowed to develop into a cycle where the slave goes fishing for compliments, i.e. instead of alleviating the insecurities, excessive compliments feed the insecurities like giving a sick child heaps of sweets which in fact acidifies the blood and increases bacterial growth. One sweet to make the child happier is fine; excessive sweets are not.

Again, setting up a fitness program is easy. Adjusting the slave’s perception of the fitness results (i.e. the Body Image) can be much more difficult. Things like scales should be taken with a LARGE Grain Of Salt, because when a slave becomes more fit their weight might not change as developing muscle tissue weighs MORE than fat, so as they loose fat and gain muscle the scale might stay the same. Depending on a mirror to yield a more subjective assessment also might be a problem in a particularly self-deprecating slave. I think perhaps the best objective assessment might well be a tailor’s flexible tape measure, taking monthly measurements of the body parts you want to change. And naturally things like an increase in cardio vascular capability, a lower pulse rate, greater flexibility, etc, are all good objective measurements. With enough objective indicators of fitness improvement it becomes harder to maintain an unhealthy body image. Harder, but unfortunately still not impossible.

HOWEVER, again speaking from my own self-acknowledged body image distortions described above, I understand that at some point an actual, perceptual shift must occur inside the individual for them to see themselves accurately. It nearly gets into the philosophy of “how do we know what we know when all is merely the interpretation of the brain?”

My best advice for a slave is to educate yourself in the well-acknowledged ways to measure your own fitness and then take steps to improve in these OBJECTIVE, scientifically proven areas. Stop comparing yourself to a size-zero model. My experience has shown me that most models became models because they were naturally thin to begin with, genetically. If those are not your genes then work with what you have and become the best You that You can be. Focus on trying to be more fit, eating right, and getting good sleep, all of which will serve you well NO MATTER WHAT.

For the Doms here, my advice is this: if your slave has a Body Image issue, be patient. Sincere compliments are fine as long as you do not go overboard. Do not cater to their self-deprecation. A simple, calm “I disagree with how you feel negatively about your body” can be plenty. Emphasize actual fitness habits, and Be The Leader in these. Initiate the journey to the gym for both of you, insist on healthier groceries, demand vitamins be taken, etc.

As a side note, THEE single most effective method of shifting to a healthy diet without “dieting” is the system called “6 Days On, 1 Day Off.” I have personally seen this system work for VASTLY more people than ANY OTHER SYSTEM (per capita) out there. And the reason is this: You eat a highly disciplined diet for 6 days of the week, and then on the 7th day you eat Anything You Want! 6 days of lean meats, vegetables, avoiding sweets, low carbs, etc, and on day 7 you can freakin’ dive in a chocolate fountain if you want. The REASON IT WORKS is this: You teach your brain to RELAX about eating. When someone is on a strict diet they inevitably start craving all the things they are not supposed to have. With “6 Days On, 1 Day Off” you tell your brain when it starts getting that craving, “hey no worries – I am going to eat that delicious, sugary thing on Day 7 – Ha!”…. and 90% of the craving GOES AWAY.

Example: Great healthy diet Sun-Fri. Around Tuesday you are out and about and you walk past the bakery, and the smell of fresh cookies wafts in your direction. You nearly drool at how delicious it smells, but then your self-discipline says, “NO!” Like a kid being told not to touch the stove, your reactionary self now wants that cookie even more! On a regular “dieting program” you would then be fighting with yourself, but on “6 Days On, 1 Day Off” your Calm Mind suddenly chimes in, “you know, that cookie is now on my list for Saturday.” Heck, you can even write it down on the calendar in your smartphone, “Saturday: have that fresh cookie.” 😀
The best part of this system is that you end up Clearly Noticing the difference in How You Feel on days 1-6; eating well makes your body happy and you feel GOOD. So after a month or two of doing “6 Days On, 1 Day Off” you get to that 7th day and suddenly you find you don’t really want that cookie this time. Suddenly you find you are starting to do “8 Days On, 1 Day Off”…. and then “2 Weeks On, 1 Day Off,” especially when you gorge on a bag of cookies on that day off (or whatever you choose to eat) and your body says, “wow, that tasted good but its obvious that does not make me feel as good as eating healthy.”

Body Image is, in fact, much more complicated than most people think. The INTENSE Subjectivity of the matter makes it a deeply personal issue. At least having a list of objective practices to reinforce a bit of science in the back of your brain can certainly help offset and balance the subjective perceptions.

— Arcane