Because your eyes are in fact attached to your head you never really see what you do, so you also barely know what you look like and act like, unless you happen to spend way too much time in front of a mirror. Of course, you get some sense of both of these since humans have developed sentience, but much of subtler details are entirely known, and all this accumulates to create some disparity between what you think of your physical self and what you actually look like physically.
Here's a video of a guy whose body-image disparity made him think he could jump over a police car, whereas he clearly couldn't:
The police were a bit rough on him though. I mean, tackling the guy for stealing candy seems a bit harsh.
Moving on, there's quite a couple consequences of body-image distortions that are far more relevant and profound than what I've shown so far. In fact, that video is probably at the very edge of being an example of body-image distortion, although I think it still demonstrates his poor understanding of his own ability. This disparity has consequences primarily when you interact with other people, who also don't quite know how they look, talk, act, etc. I, like most people, also don't know very well what I sound like. I assume I speak with a slight America accent at a decent volume, whereas most people falsely claim I have a strong Chinese accent and am very close to being entirely inaudible. However, in most cases, these things tend to be subtle, unless taken to extremes.
Body-image distortion has some negative consequences, causing diseases like anorexia and bulimia, when they see themselves as being too fat when they actually aren't, going to great lengths to try to fix this. There is also a strong cultural element here, since in Middle Eastern countries, where larger women are considered attractive, which I think may be related to the paucity of food in the desert until recent times, anorexia and bulimia are far less prevalent.
However, body-image does play a major role in many sports. Many activities, such as any form of aerial kicks in martial arts and most of the types of parkour movements, require absolute confidence in your own ability, so any body-image distortion that leads to doubt your own ability and/or leads to an instance of hesitation, where you trip on your own feet or slow down by any amount, could be catastrophic.
Another important detail about your self-image is that it's self-reinforcing. It's a specific case of confirmation bias at its worst. Any feedback you get that verifies your self-image is accepted, and much of the rest is ignored for whatever reasons you can come up with, so your self-image seems right. This makes it very hard to change your self-image, or improve on it at all. This exacerbates anorexia and bulimia, since they're stuck in that mentality of being too fat.
Does being aware of this affect anything? Does knowing you're doing this help correct your own self-image? Or is this a case of "ignorance is bliss," would it be better not to unstabilize your self-image?
And of course, this is almost obligatory for this discussion:
[The images above, or below, or maybe even sideways depending on your perspective, are not mine but are merely lending their time in making my post thing look more amusing. Please thank them for their time by not copying them without permission from their respective authors and by donating food to help families celebrate Thanksgiving and cure cancer and whatever.]
