Body Image

I'm up late printing and working on my computer for the magazine deadline, and I was scrolling through some of the links of the day on fitness and health. One of the little articles I read talked about learning to love yourself in the mirror and phrase things positively when looking at your parts.

I worked with teenagers (still teach them karate) and I went on many trips. Five or six girls would end up piled on one of the queen size hotel beds in their pajamas talking about wearing this or eating that and snippets of what they thought of their bodies would drop all throughout the conversation. Always curious about how the female mind works, even mine, I prompted an open discussion about body image--specifically what each of them experience when they look in the mirror.

What I discovered was that on average, when one of these girls looked in the mirror, she gave herself four or five negative criticisms to a single self-compliment. What! Maybe I'm positively warped from the attitude my parents had toward their bodies, but when I look in the mirror, even now, I give myself four or five compliments to a single negative. Sometimes I leave out the negative, but there are quite a few days right now when I'm not really happy with my hair.

I've never had too much of a problem with my weight. Even now I'm comfortable with what I lost the first year after my baby was born. I would like to be more focused on working out, but I would like to be more focused on a lot of things. I'm losing the weight steadily by maintaining the habits I had before I got pregnant for the last time and they are paying off. My day would be miserable if I always started it out by telling myself how much I suck. Yikes.

I suggest for anybody out there to get started on a more uplifting influence to tape five affirmations to their mirror and read them OUT LOUD every day at least once, and definitely before your mind has a chance to get too far down the list of negatives it usually recites. Try it. It's actually kind of fun. Well, mine are mostly in my head, but my husband does write notes to me on our bathroom mirror that either tell me I'm cool or that he wants to go see a particular movie. I talk to myself in the mirror as if my reflection is another person (don't worry--I've never answered myself back) and do my affirmations that way. I also vent that way, sometimes, too. It's hard to be negative for too long when I see how twisted my face gets when I'm mad.

(I also used to talk to myself in the mirror when I had to write an essay or paper for school, but that's something else entirely.)