That Feeling You Can’t Shake
I was always the tall kid. In elementary school, there was one boy who was taller than me. That’s it.
Then puberty hit. I developed larger boobs. And the early-nineties teenage clothing? It absolutely did not accommodate that. Every shopping trip was more reinforcement of the same message: your body is too big.
And that was before I ever even struggled with my weight.
As I got older and started carrying more weight on top of an already tall, structurally broad frame, that belief just got louder. Too large. Too big. Too much.
If you’re a physician who has struggled with your weight, I’d bet you know this feeling well. Maybe you’ve carried it for decades. And maybe, like me, you didn’t realize just how much it was running things behind the scenes.
It Goes Way Beyond How You Feel About Your Body
Here’s what I’ve noticed — both in my own life and in recent coaching calls with physicians. This “too big” belief doesn’t just live in the mirror. It quietly changes how you show up everywhere.
In photos. You see the picture and instead of noticing the fun memory, you zoom in on how much space you take up compared to your more petite friends. Maybe you avoid photos altogether.
At meals with colleagues. You worry about what you’re eating and whether people are watching. Did I take too much? Are they judging what the overweight doctor puts on her plate? You second-guess the most basic decisions about food.
In how you carry yourself physically. You might try to take up less space. Change your posture. Dress to minimize. Make yourself physically smaller.
And here’s the sneaky part. That shrinking doesn’t stop at your body. When you hold a belief that you’re “too much,” you can start taking up less space with your opinions. Your needs. Your wants. You become less likely to stand up and speak your mind — because your whole system is focused on making you less big.
Think about where that might be showing up for you. Not just with your body, but in your day-to-day life. In how you show up at work, in meetings, in your relationships.
Who Actually Decided You’re Too Big?
This is the question I posed in a recent episode of the Thriving As A Physician podcast, and I think it’s worth sitting with.
Who decided what “too large” is? Where was the meeting held where everybody sat down and agreed on the right body size?
Because when you actually look at it, the “right size” we’re all comparing ourselves to is an over-thin, unrealistic ideal. Media handed it to us. Fashion handed it to us. TV and movies reinforced it over and over.
There was no meeting. It’s not scientific. Nobody looked at the actual range of real human bodies and came up with this ideal. It’s a standard that most people can never reach — and particularly if you have a body that’s structurally larger or holds more weight, it was never within your reach. Ever.
And yet, so many of us have spent decades on a hamster wheel, exerting all this energy trying to reach something that was never realistic. That takes a toll. It takes energy. Effort. And a whole lot of blaming yourself when you can’t get there.
The beauty of human beings is our range of diversity. If we all looked exactly the same — cookie cutter bodies, cookie cutter hair — it would be a really boring world. And yet that’s what we’ve been told to aspire to.
Why This Matters for Your Eating
Here’s where it gets really important for those of us working on our weight and eating.
There is a big difference between making changes to your eating from a place of “I’m too large and I need to fix that” versus making changes from a place of “I’m worthy exactly as I am, and I want habits that help me live my best life.”
When you’re driven by “I need to correct this deficit,” that’s where the really restrictive, miserable diets come from. The ones that don’t feel good but you force yourself through because you believe there’s something fundamentally wrong with your body that needs fixing.
And here’s what I’ve seen over and over — you can lose a lot of weight and still feel “too big.” Still judge yourself. Still feel like it’s not enough. Because if you don’t change the underlying belief, the weight loss alone won’t fix how you feel about your body.
Instead, imagine making changes to your eating from this place: “You know what, maybe I don’t want that food because I know I’ll be tired afterwards. Maybe I don’t want it because I’m working on a goal — like being able to hike that trail — and this choice doesn’t help me get there.”
Those are very different conversations than “I need to stop eating that because I’m too large.”
One comes from worthiness. The other comes from shame. And they lead to very different results.
Your Body’s Worth Doesn’t Fluctuate with the Scale
I want to be really clear about this because it’s important.
Fluctuations in weight or body fat do not change your worth as a person. They don’t change the worth of your body. There is nothing about your body that makes you less worthy. The only reason it feels that way is because we’ve been taught to compare ourselves to an unrealistic ideal.
Has it always been this way? No. Look at art through history. The Rubinesque paintings didn’t prize thin, slim bodies. What’s considered beautiful and ideal has shifted over and over. There can be beauty in any body, in any person. It’s not fitting into a mold that makes you worthy.
So What Can You Actually Do?
I don’t have a magic fix for this one. These are deeply embedded beliefs, usually from childhood, reinforced over a lifetime. They’ll probably keep coming up.
But here’s what I do in my own life. I’m six feet tall. I’m not willowy — I’ve got some shoulders and some structure on me. And there are still moments where that “too big” feeling catches me. But now, when I catch it, I choose to reject it. I get a little edgy about it honestly.
Like — no. Some unrealistic ideal that got handed to me by media is not going to define how I feel in my body today. Nobody else lives in my body. Nobody else gets to decide.
You can start here:
- Just question it. Do you actually want to continue holding the belief that you’re “too big”? That question alone is powerful.
- Notice where it shows up beyond your body. Is it changing how you eat around people? How you show up in meetings? Whether you speak up?
- Remember that beliefs are optional. Even the ones that feel very true and very intense. Even the ones you’ve had since you were a kid. A belief is just a thought you’ve chosen to think over and over. You can choose differently.
- Even a small shift matters. If you can let go of the “too big” belief by even 25%, it will change your days. It will change the conversations you have with yourself about food.
The Real Goal
This is why I named my podcast Thriving As A Physician and why my program is called Thrive Academy. Because it’s not about losing weight at any cost. That’s not what we ultimately want.
When we look at why we want to lose weight, most of us think life will be better when we’re smaller. But that’s only true if we also change how we think about ourselves. Body image work — deciding your body is worthy no matter what the scale says — is important at any point in any journey.
You are worth doing this work.
If this resonates, I go much deeper into this in the latest episode of the Thriving As A Physician podcast. Listen wherever you get your podcasts, or click here to listen.
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