Brian Pollack, LCSW, CEDS-C
Brian is the Founder and Clinical Director of Hilltop Behavioral Health, a boutique eating disorder specialty practice in Summit, NJ. He is one of the few male master’s-level Certified Eating Disorder Specialists in the country, with expertise in FBT, male clients, athletes, and muscle dysmorphia. He hosts the Minding Men podcast and serves as an adjunct professor at Yeshiva University.
Learn more about Brian →In a recent episode of the Nourish and Empower Podcast, Jessica and Maggie sat with a topic that comes through my office more often than people realize: weddings, bridesmaid dresses, prom, and the body image storms that gather around them. The episode opened with a video of a mother telling her daughter, “You were beautiful in every single dress you wore, and it didn’t matter the size.” If only we all grew up with that messaging!
As an eating disorder therapist who works with clients who are engaged, in wedding parties, or planning milestone events, I want to add some scaffolding to the conversation Jessica and Maggie started. Their lived wisdom lines up almost perfectly with what Dr. Niva Piran, one of the most respected researchers in our field, has spent her career studying: the Developmental Theory of Embodiment.
Why Weddings Are an Embodiment Issue, Not Just a Body Image Issue
Body image is framed as a feeling about how one looks. Embodiment is a bigger and more useful concept. Piran defines embodiment as the lived, felt experience of inhabiting one’s body, and her research shows that this experience is shaped along three pathways: Physical Freedom (vs. Corseting), Mental Freedom (vs. Corseting), and Social Power (vs. Disempowerment and Disconnection) (Piran, 2017; Piran et al., 2023).
Translation for the bride, the bridesmaid, the prom date, the wedding guest: how present you feel in your own skin on that day is not a willpower issue. It is the cumulative result of years of physical, mental, and social experiences telling you whether your body is yours, whether it is allowed to take up space, and whether it is safe to feel.
Weddings concentrate every one of those variables into a single afternoon.
The Seamstress, the Bridal Boutique, and “Body Disciplining”
Jessica recounted her seamstress telling her, at the final fitting, to “go have a cheeseburger or three.” Maggie’s tailor told her, “You can’t get bigger and you can’t get smaller.” These remarks were almost certainly not malicious. They are simply how our culture is fluent in talking about a woman’s body around a wedding.
Piran has a specific term for this. In her research on the physical domain of embodiment, she identifies a construct, body ownership, which often in such circumstances can find someone being respected or violated. One way ownership is violated is through what she calls body disciplining, defined as forced or pressured bodily practices, including being pressured to diet, restrict, or alter one’s body to meet an external standard (Piran et al., 2023). When a tailor, a future mother-in-law, or a stranger in the comments section of a bridal boutique’s post tells a woman her body needs to be different by a certain date, that is body disciplining. It is a small, normalized violation of body ownership. And small violations, repeated across a lifetime, are how clients end up in my office.
This is also why the fat-phobic comments on that bridal boutique’s curve-model post landed with such force on the podcast. As Jessica named it, the disrespect was a reflection of the commenters’ own bodies-in-distress, not of the model. Piran’s research backs this up directly: adverse experiences in the social environment, including prejudice and harassment, are statistically associated with reduced embodiment, lower body appreciation, and disrupted eating (Piran, Counsell, Teall, Komes, & Evans, 2023).
Physical Freedom is Very Real!
One of my favorite moments in the episode was Jessica describing her entrance to her reception: barefoot, sprinting into the ballroom, landing in a split. That is not a quirky anecdote. That is a textbook example of Physical Freedom, the construct Piran defines as the freedom to use one’s body for movement, function, and pleasure rather than being confined to its appearance (Piran, 2017).
The opposite, Physical Corseting, is the woman who cannot eat at her own reception because her dress is too tight, who will not sit down because she is afraid of how her arms will look, who has rehearsed every angle for the photographer and forgotten to dance with her grandmother. Piran’s qualitative work (the foundation of the theory, drawn from longitudinal interviews with girls and women across the lifespan) shows that this corseting is learned early, often by early adolescence, and is reinforced at appearance-focused life events (Piran, 2017).
Maggie’s advice to clients, eat before you try on dresses, move in the dressing room, choose comfortable shoes, is, clinically speaking, an embodiment intervention. She is helping clients reclaim Physical Freedom in real time.
Mental Freedom: Whose Voice Are You Hearing in the Mirror?
Piran’s second pathway, Mental Freedom, refers to freedom from constricting social discourses, the cultural scripts about what a woman’s body should look like, especially at peak appearance moments like weddings (Piran et al., 2023). Mental Corseting is when those scripts run your inner monologue. Don’t eat the day of. Lose ten pounds first. The dress will look better if. You’ll regret the pictures if.
The mother in the viral video was doing exactly what the research recommends: she was inoculating her daughter against those scripts by repeating, across years, a different one. “It didn’t matter the size. It’s about your confidence.” Mental Freedom is not built in a single pep talk. It is built in the accumulated weight of trusted voices contradicting the cultural noise.
For the bride who did not grow up with that mother, the work is harder but absolutely possible. This is some of the most rewarding work we do at Hilltop.
Social Power: Bridesmaids, Choice, and Connection
Maggie’s honesty about having a harder time with body image as a bridesmaid than as a bride maps onto Piran’s third pathway: Social Power and Relational Connection. Embodiment is shaped by how much agency we have over our own bodies in social contexts and how connected we feel to others (Piran, 2017; Piran et al., 2023). As a bride, you (usually) choose. As a bridesmaid, you are often choosing within someone else’s frame. The loss of agency, even in a loving context, can disrupt embodiment.
This is why Jessica’s approach to her own bridesmaids, “tell me a style that feels good on your body,” is not just kindness. It is an act of preserving Social Power for the women standing next to her. It is also, I would argue, an excellent prevention strategy.
What I Want Every Bride, and Every Bridesmaid, to Know
You deserve to be present on your wedding day. Not a smaller version of you. Not a future you. The you who is standing in the dress today. That presence is not a personality trait you were either born with or not. It is built, and it can still be built, even three weeks out from the ceremony.
If your relationship with your body is making it hard to be present, that is information, not a verdict. It tells us something about the physical, mental, and social experiences your body has been carrying. Those can be addressed. Reach out. You are allowed to enjoy the day.
References
Piran, N. (2017). Journeys of Embodiment at the Intersection of Body and Culture: The Developmental Theory of Embodiment. Academic Press.
Piran, N., Teall, T. L., & Counsell, A. (2023). Expanding the social lens: A quantitative study of the developmental theory of embodiment. Body Image, 44, 256–269.
Piran, N., Counsell, A., Teall, T. L., Komes, J., & Evans, E. H. (2023). The developmental theory of embodiment: Quantitative measurement of facilitative and adverse experiences in the social environment. Body Image, 44, 174–207.
