It’s not exactly news that we’re obsessed with our bodies. Open Instagram, turn on Netflix, scroll through TikTok — you’ll be hit with messages telling you how to tone, shrink, optimize or fix the way you look. The message is subtle, but clear: your body needs to be changed.
And it’s working. According to the National Organization for Women, 91 percent of women—and studies show about 95 percent of men—say they feel unhappy and dissatisfied with their bodies.
For a lot of people, that insecurity doesn’t just get internalized — it takes root as something deeper. Something heavier. Something that looks a lot like shame.
Jess Connolly gets it.
The author, speaker, and Bible teacher has spent years navigating her own complicated relationship with her body — and the shame that came with it. She’s also spent years unlearning it. Her book Breaking Free From Body Shame pulls back the curtain on what healing actually looks like, especially for Christians who’ve been told to “honor God with your body” but weren’t taught what that meant if you didn’t love the one you’re in.
We sat down with Connolly to talk about where shame starts, how faith can help us move past it, and what it looks like to embrace a “kingdom-body mindset.”
Connolly says her earliest memory as a human being is one of body shame.
“I had this memory of riding in the back of one of my parents’ cars, and tracing my hand down my body,” she recalls. “I can kind of remember that whole weekend, and I remember feeling like it was not right. That I wasn’t like anyone else around me. That my body was just not quite there.”
That feeling stuck. And even as she grew into a ministry career, writing books and speaking to thousands, that old script kept running in the background. The turning point came when she realized her biggest pain point might actually be the place of her greatest healing — but only if she was willing to go there first.
“I knew if I could get some healing here, if I could get some victory here, I could write about this,” she says. “But the healing had to go first.”
Healing, for Connolly, was a long and deliberate process. And maybe not the one people expect.
“To be totally transparent, in my writing and speaking about it, I’m really intentionally vague,” she says. “I do that on purpose. For me, a lot of my disordered behaviors came from other people sharing testimonies. That became kind of a tutorial for me, like, ‘OK, I could dip my toe in these waters.’ So I’m pretty cautious about that.”
What she will say is that it started with a thought: What if I don’t have to feel this way all the time?
“I actually think God has something better for me,” she says. “I have experienced these waves of purpose and passion and healing and freedom in all the other areas of my life. There’s got to be something here.”
From there, she found a mentor who shared what she calls a “kingdom-body mindset.” She went to therapy. She journaled. She asked hard questions. And over time, she started to believe something she’d never considered might be true: maybe God wasn’t disappointed in her body.
“A kingdom-body mindset means I believe I have a King,” she explains. “And that changes how I view my body. In particular, my King, Jesus, is a part of the triune Godhead that made my body — and made it good. He’s not disappointed or dismayed or frustrated or surprised at the state of my body. He made me intentionally. He creatively made me not look like everybody else.”
Connolly says God’s compassion is at the heart of this mindset. “When my body actually experiences weakness and sickness and illness, He’s not like, ‘Get it together.’ He has compassion for that. My body isn’t just about what’s happening here on Earth. It’s part of eternity. It’s not a trophy. It’s not a project I’m trying to fix or finish.”
That framing might feel radical, especially for people who grew up in churches where conversations about body image were rare — if they happened at all.
“Absolutely. One hundred and ten percent,” Connolly says. “I think we’re scared. I think that in general, talking about freedom freaks us out a little bit.”
Freedom, she points out, isn’t one-size-fits-all — and that makes some Christian leaders nervous.
“I can’t tell you how many women have expressed their nervousness to me about freedom,” she says. “But freedom isn’t standardized. That’s called legalism.”
The other reason the church has stayed quiet? According to Connolly, it’s not that complicated.
“I think we’ve co-signed on a lot of cultural strongholds, one of which is the objectification of women. I think we’ve kind of co-signed on this idea that women should be tidy, pretty trophies,” she says. “We’ve even kind of rewritten that into the narrative of Scripture in a way that I do not believe at all is God’s heart.”
That distortion, she says, has made it harder for the church to confront what body shame really is: a theological problem.
“I had a lot of male pastors reach out to me when the book came out, saying they were going to do a series on body image,” she says. “And I would tell them to slow down. Remember what we’ve learned these past few years. Just because you notice an issue doesn’t mean you have to teach about it right away.”
Instead, she encourages pastors to pause and listen.
“I don’t think we’re going to like what we hear,” she says. “It’s not going to be pleasant to realize that 97 percent of women in our churches genuinely hate their bodies. That means 97 percent of women aren’t appreciating what God has done or can do in their lives. That’s a really big issue.”
She believes the only way forward is to make space for the truth — the hard, uncomfortable truth — to be named out loud. That means listening to how women have been taught to distrust their bodies. Listening to how chronic illness, reproductive health, and even simple discomfort have been spiritualized or dismissed. Listening to the pressure to either hide their pain or fix it with vitamins and essential oils — and call it godliness.
And it’s not just a “women’s issue.” Connolly is quick to point out that studies show 95 percent of men also experience body image issues, though few are willing to talk about it.
“When I hear men talk negatively about their body, nobody catches it. It doesn’t tickle anybody’s ears in the wrong way,” she says. “It’s all aesthetic. Think about ‘dad bod’ jokes. I actually don’t think the approach has to be that different. They might just have to decide it’s a problem.”
That moment in the backseat — Jess tracing her hand down her body, realizing something didn’t feel right — wasn’t just the beginning of her story. It’s the beginning of a story a lot of us have lived, whether we realize it or not. We carry those early messages for years, maybe decades, until one day we have to ask: Where did that voice come from, and why have we believed it for so long?
Connolly’s work doesn’t offer quick fixes or five-step plans. What she offers is more disruptive: permission to stop hating the body you’ve spent years at war with. To stop treating your body like a problem to solve. To stop spiritualizing your shame.
For anyone who’s grown up hearing mixed messages about faith and appearance — especially in church — that’s not a small shift. It’s a full-on rewire. But it starts somewhere. Not with a dramatic breakthrough or viral testimony. Just a quiet question that shows up one day and refuses to leave:
What if this isn’t the way it has to be?
