Dr. Melisa Arias-Valenzuela, CPsych

10/07/2026

Sometimes evidence-based therapy looks very sophisticated.

And sometimes I’m telling you to take terrible photos of yourself and buy bigger pants. 📸👖🤷🏻‍♀️

But there is, in fact, a method to the madness.

A lot of body image struggles are maintained not only by what we think about our bodies, but by what we do when those thoughts and feelings show up.

We check.

We ask for reassurance.

We avoid being photographed.

We carefully manage how we’re seen.

We wear uncomfortable clothes because the size feels more acceptable.

We look in the mirror and immediately start evaluating.

And these behaviours often work, at least temporarily.

They reduce anxiety. Give us reassurance. Help us feel a little more in control.

Which is exactly why our brains keep asking us to do them.

So sometimes body image therapy involves doing something that feels slightly ridiculous on purpose.

Not because the goal is to prove:

“See! You actually look great!”

But because we’re practicing something much more useful:

I can feel uncertain without checking.

I can be seen without perfectly managing how I look.

I can dislike a photo without making it mean something about me.

I can notice my body without grading it.

I can let discomfort show up without immediately trying to make it disappear.

Body image healing isn’t always learning to think nicer thoughts about your body.

Often, it’s teaching your brain that you don’t have to obey every body image thought in the first place.

Anyway, your homework is to take some terrible pictures.

Very clinical. Very serious. 😂

Looking for more body image healing education and support? Stick around for a while. Follow Melisa Arias-Valenzuela CPsych 🙋🏻‍♀️
Also follow my practice for everyday mental wellness Uprise Psychology & Wellness 🏡

Disclaimer: My social media accounts are for educational purposes only and should not be considered psychotherapy or medical care.

10/06/2026

Yes, I’m a psychologist. Yes, Spooky Season is also my Super Bowl. 🎃👻🍂

Some people wait all year for summer.

I wait all year to suddenly decide that every available surface needs a tiny pumpkin on it.

Give me the crisp air. The changing leaves. The aggressively cozy sweaters. The candles. The scary movies. The Halloween decorations that are perhaps slightly excessive for a healthcare professional.

I contain multitudes.

Some of those multitudes are evidence-based.

Some are decorative skeletons.

Happy spooky season from your local psychologist who is taking this all extremely seriously. 🎃

Looking for more body image healing education and support? Stick around for a while. Follow Melisa Arias-Valenzuela CPsych 🙋🏻‍♀️
Also follow my practice for everyday mental wellness Uprise Psychology & Wellness 🏡

Disclaimer: My social media accounts are for educational purposes only and should not be considered psychotherapy or medical care.

10/06/2026

Growth is realizing I do not need an app to approve my afternoon snack. 🍓🥪🍩

Because somewhere along the way, we normalized outsourcing incredibly basic body decisions to numbers on a screen.

Am I hungry enough to eat?

Have I “earned” it?

Do I have enough calories left?

Does it fit my macros?

Should I wait until dinner?

Meanwhile, your body is like: hello??? I said I was hungry 45 minutes ago.

And to be clear, tracking can serve a purpose for some people in some contexts.

But when a number gets more authority over whether you’re “allowed” to eat than your own hunger, needs, preferences, or circumstances, it might be worth getting curious about that relationship.

Part of healing your relationship with food can be learning to tolerate the uncertainty of not having an external system tell you exactly what, when, and how much you’re permitted to eat.

Sometimes you’re hungry.

Sometimes you want a snack.

Sometimes the snack is just good.

No permission slip required.

Anyway, sh*tty day. Excellent snack. We persist. 😂

Looking for more body image healing education and support? Stick around for a while. Follow Melisa Arias-Valenzuela CPsych 🙋🏻‍♀️
Also follow my practice for everyday mental wellness Uprise Psychology & Wellness 🏡

Disclaimer: My social media accounts are for educational purposes only and should not be considered psychotherapy or medical care.

10/03/2026

10/02/2026

This week has felt heavy.

I’ve been following the allegations surrounding the Cornell 7, and I keep coming back to the same feeling: how are we still here?

And then I go to work.

I talk about body image. Eating disorders. Self-compassion. Self-objectification. Helping people feel safer in their bodies.

And for a moment, it can all feel painfully small.

But the more I sit with that feeling, the more I’m reminded that these conversations are not entirely separate.

Sexual trauma can profoundly change someone’s relationship with their body. Trauma, eating disorders and body image can intersect in complicated ways. And all of this exists within a culture where women and girls are still routinely taught to see their bodies through other people’s eyes—to monitor, evaluate, shrink, please and make themselves desirable.

Of course, body image work will not end sexual violence. Therapy cannot dismantle an oppressive system on its own.

But helping someone reconnect with their body, recognize their boundaries, trust their internal experience, take up space, and know that their body belongs to them?

That matters too.

I think sometimes when we care deeply about what is happening in the world, we become overwhelmed by the size of the problem and underestimate the value of the small piece that is ours to do.

So this week, I’m trying to let the grief and anger remind me what I care about rather than convince me that my contribution is irrelevant.

I can’t fix all of it.

But I can keep doing my small piece.

And small is not the same thing as meaningless.

Looking for more body image healing education and support? Stick around for a while. Follow Melisa Arias-Valenzuela CPsych 🙋🏻‍♀️
Also follow my practice for everyday mental wellness Uprise Psychology & Wellness 🏡

Disclaimer: My social media accounts are for educational purposes only and should not be considered psychotherapy or medical care.

10/01/2026

This week has felt heavy.

Like so many women, I’ve been reading about the allegations surrounding the Cornell 7, and I’ve found myself cycling through sadness, anger, disbelief, and that particularly exhausting feeling of: how are we here?

And it has me thinking about the way we talk about healing.

We often imagine healing as becoming softer. More peaceful. More compassionate. More regulated.

And sometimes it is.

But sometimes healing makes you angry.

Because the more you understand objectification, shame, power and violence, the harder it becomes not to notice the systems that sustain them.

The ways women learn to experience their bodies through other people’s eyes.

The ways our value gets tangled up with desirability.

The ways objectification can become so ordinary that we stop recognizing it as objectification.

The ways women are taught how to protect themselves from violence while far less attention is given to dismantling the cultures that normalize, excuse or enable it.

Sometimes anger is not an emotion we need to immediately soothe away.

Sometimes anger is information.

This matters.

This should not be normal.

Something needs to change.

Healing has taught me a lot about finding peace within myself.

But increasingly, I think it has also taught me that peace within ourselves does not require making peace with systems that harm us.

Sometimes healing is quiet.

And sometimes it’s righteous anger, and deciding that the women and girls coming after us deserve something different.

Looking for more body image healing education and support? Stick around for a while. Follow Melisa Arias-Valenzuela CPsych 🙋🏻‍♀️
Also follow my practice for everyday mental wellness Uprise Psychology & Wellness 🏡

Disclaimer: My social media accounts are for educational purposes only and should not be considered psychotherapy or medical care.

09/30/2026

I’m a body image psychologist and I’m a bit embarrassed to admit:

I still have bad body image days.

I still occasionally see a photo and think, “Wait… THAT’S what I look like?” 😅

I still compare sometimes.

I still notice body changes and have feelings about them.

And despite years of studying this stuff, my first thought about my body is not always particularly compassionate, rational, or evidence-based. Rude.

But here’s the part I’m not embarrassed about:

I’ve gotten much better at what happens next.

I don’t have to believe every thought.

I don’t have to check again.

I don’t have to ask for reassurance.

I don’t have to change what I eat.

I don’t have to avoid the photo, outfit, event, or experience.

And I don’t have to turn a difficult feeling about my body into a problem with my body.

That, to me, is a much more realistic picture of body image healing.

Knowing the psychology doesn’t make me immune to living in a culture that has taught women to monitor, compare, and evaluate their bodies.

And healing hasn’t meant finally reaching a place where I love how I look every day.

It’s meant having more flexibility when I don’t.

My body image can be loud.

It just doesn’t get to make all my decisions anymore. 🤍

Looking for more body image healing education and support? Stick around for a while. Follow Melisa Arias-Valenzuela CPsych 🙋🏻‍♀️
Also follow my practice for everyday mental wellness Uprise Psychology & Wellness 🏡

Disclaimer: My social media accounts are for educational purposes only and should not be considered psychotherapy or medical care.

09/29/2026

The internet is creating job security for body image psychologists 🤷🏻‍♀️

Because so many of the messages my clients are trying to unlearn didn’t come out of nowhere.

They came from years of being told:

Your body changing means something is wrong.

Hunger needs to be controlled.

Food needs to be optimized.

Exercise only counts if it changes your body.

Aging is something to prevent.

Weight loss is evidence you’re doing something right.

Confidence needs to come before participation.

And if you feel uncomfortable in your body, the obvious solution is to change it.

The problem is that when you hear these messages often enough, they stop sounding like opinions.

They start sounding like facts.

And suddenly you’re monitoring your body, negotiating with hunger, checking photos, comparing yourself, postponing things, or treating completely normal body changes like problems that need solving.

A lot of body image work is actually learning to pause and ask:

Where did I learn this?

Is it actually true?

Is following this rule helping me?

And how much of my life is being organized around it?

Because your body does not need to be your lifelong self-improvement project.

Learning that you can stop giving your body quite so much homework in the first place is truly healing.

Anyway, please stop giving my clients homework, internet. I have enough to do. 😩

09/25/2026

The dessert is rarely the part I’m worried about. 👀

It’s what happens after the dessert.

“I shouldn’t have eaten that.”

“I was so bad.”

“I need to make up for it tomorrow.”

“I have no self-control.”

“I shouldn’t have anything else tonight.”

Suddenly, eating something enjoyable has become evidence about your discipline, health, body, or worth.

And that relationship with food can become far more harmful than the dessert itself.

Food guilt can keep us stuck in cycles of restriction, compensation, overeating, body checking, and an increasingly rigid relationship with eating.

Not to mention turning a perfectly good piece of cake into a full-blown moral crisis. 😅

You’re allowed to eat something because it tastes good.

You’re allowed to feel full afterward.

You’re allowed to enjoy food without immediately calculating how to undo it.

And you definitely don’t need to punish your body for being fed.

Sometimes the healthiest thing you can do after eating dessert is remarkably unexciting:

Enjoy it. Move on. Continue being a person.🤍

Looking for more body image healing education and support? Stick around for a while. Follow Melisa Arias-Valenzuela CPsych 🙋🏻‍♀️
Also follow my practice for everyday mental wellness Uprise Psychology & Wellness 🏡

Disclaimer: My social media accounts are for educational purposes only and should not be considered psychotherapy or medical care.

09/24/2026

Bad body image doesn’t always announce itself with “I hate my body.”

Sometimes it’s much quieter.

You change your outfit again.

You check the photo before deciding whether you liked the night.

You become a little more aware of your stomach when someone walks into the room.

You skip the snack because you’re “not that hungry.”

You tell yourself you’ll buy the swimsuit later.

You ask for reassurance… just one more time.

None of these behaviours necessarily mean there’s a problem on their own.

But one thing I pay attention to as a body image psychologist is how much someone’s attention and behaviour are becoming organized around their appearance.

Because negative body image can create a sneaky feedback loop:

You feel uncomfortable → you check, compare, avoid, restrict, hide, or seek reassurance → you get a little relief → your brain learns that your body really was something that needed managing.

And slowly, body image gets louder.

This is also why healing isn’t just learning to think nicer thoughts about your body.

Sometimes it’s noticing the tiny ways body image has started making decisions for you, and gently taking those decisions back.

Wearing the thing.

Eating the snack.

Keeping the photo.

Going anyway.

Letting discomfort exist without immediately turning your body into a problem to solve.

Because sometimes one of the first signs of body image healing isn’t:

“I love my body.”

It’s:

“Huh. I’m thinking about it a lot less.”🤍

Looking for more body image healing education and support? Stick around for a while. Follow Melisa Arias-Valenzuela CPsych 🙋🏻‍♀️
Also follow my practice for everyday mental wellness Uprise Psychology & Wellness 🏡

Disclaimer: My social media accounts are for educational purposes only and should not be considered psychotherapy or medical care.