It is common to compare yourself to others. It’s common to critique your own figure in the light of someone else’s picture, it’s common to look at someone and wish you had what they had, and it’s common to feel poorly about yourself as a result of comparing yourself to others.
I will deal with three following questions:
1. Why do we do this?
2. What is the harm?
3. How do we begin to break away from it?
Why Do we do this?
We use comparison to others in a two-fold manner. We use it to serve as a benchmark for our own progress, and we use it to envisage what we would like to have in the future. This would not be an issue if humans were all the same, had the same genetics, the same lifestyle, stressors, responsibilities, etc. The issue is that we are all vastly different physically, and comparing ourselves to other bodies is a losing game.
It’s not wrong to want a benchmark to determine your progress, and it’s not wrong to want a body that is leaner, stronger, and more capable. However, when the benchmark of progress, and the body we envision is embodied (literally) by another person, it creates an unrealistic expectation of how we are going to look. (setting us up to be forever disappointed with ourselves, and questioning why on earth we are continuing to get it wrong).
What is the harm?
When we see a person, whom we subsequently compare ourselves to because of their body or their lifestyle or whatever, we are decontextualizing them from their life. Let’s say you go out to dinner with a couple who seem to really love each other. They laugh, they play with one another, they jovially poke fun at one another, and they are physically all over one another. By interacting with them, you might say, “I want a relationship like this.”
This is a good desire that is completely uneducated. You are not seeing the other 99% of the relationship, therefore you have no idea the work and effort it took to have a relationship like the one you are witnessing; nor do you have any idea if the relationship is actually genuine. This is what I mean by
decontextualizing a characteristic of someone or a group of people. We don’t know the entire landscape of their life, and yet when we compare ourselves to them that is precisely what we are doing.
In the fitness and health space, those with the best bodies, and most extravagant routines are pushed to the top of our feeds (We are literally being socially fed a decontextualized picture of those who have what we want: a never ending cycle of comparison).
They are the “standard” that everyone else is trying to follow; they serve as a false north star of fitness. Over time, this makes us feel awful about ourselves, due to us being incessantly being reminded of how far we are away from “the standard.
”How do we break away from this?
Breaking away from the comparison game is much less about the particular behaviors that cause you to compare, and much more about the why behind the behavior. We don’t compare ourselves to others because they are in front of us, or under our thumb on a screen.
We compare ourselves because we are deeply insecure about our own lives. We are discontent with our bodies, our hobbies, how our lives have turned out, so we look outward at an artificial projection of what we feel like we want. We turn other human beings into a panoply of caricature-esque ideals that we internally pursue.
Therefore, the answering of breaking away from the comparison game is not discovered in a cessation of behavior. It is discovered by understanding why you are discontent, and insecure in your own life.
Personally, I have always struggled with this. I have always looked at others who seemingly “have what I want,” and believed that if I only had “that body,
” or “that routine,” I would be satisfied. Over the past 14 years of taking my physical health seriously, my body has changed drastically, my weight has fluctuated, I have tried endless routines and programs, and it has never felt ideal; not once.
This has taught me that the only way to accept who I am, is to accept who I am. I cannot change myself into acceptance; it doesn’t work that way. When we compare our bodies, and our lives to others, we are essentially saying, “When I have that, I can relax. When I look like that, or live that way, I will have made it.”
One of the main ways that I have discovered this to be a lie is by talking to people who actually have what I would like. Are they satisfied? Do they feel as if they have made it? What I discovered is that they, just like me, are chasing another ideal they have extricated out of a micro-fragment of someone else’s life.
Those people who are healthy, content, and live full lives are not chasing the life of another person. They have chosen to accept themselves and pursue health and fitness in a way that makes sense for their own life.
Lee Ramsey has a passion for fitness as a way to help people grow and change into more adaptable, capable and resilient versions of themselves. He is owner of Sanctify Fitness in Covington and a regular fitness columnist for the NKyTribune.