Quote:
Originally Posted by EddieD
I was at the club tonight and couldn't help but notice how much thinner than me all the other women were. Made me really self conscious and embarrassed. I tried to look at it as inspiration, like "Give it time and work and you'll look like that, too." But that got me to thinking and realizing that I can't remember a time when I've ever been comfortable in my body. I've always been overweight, and so have my parents. It terrifies me to think that, no matter what I do, nothing short of surgery or starvation will work. I've tried so many things, ever since I was a kid. Why should it turn out differently now? Isn't that the definition of insanity?
That is so not true. In order to believe this you must think that thin girls are starving themselves in order to look like that. That's a distorted view of yourself and how you relate to the world. This was true for me too, when I first went to see my nutritional therapist she asked me some questions about how I viewed the way others looked and ate. Long story short, I told her that thin people really did not eat, they only pretended to eat in public and starved themselves in private. I can't believe I actually believed that.
Something very helpful to me was to look in the mirror daily and say kind things to myself. At first this feels very unnatural and it feels like a lie. I was very used to looking in the mirror and saying terrible things to my reflection. It was always "ugh, I'm so fat, ugh, my thighs are full of cellulite, look at the bulges, it's so disgusting." Saying those things every day made looking in the mirror very painful and it distorted my view of what I looked like. Those were all opinions, insults I was hurling at myself, it's not reality. So yes at first saying kind things like "my legs are strong" and "my skin is beautiful" felt very unnatural, almost comical. Then I started working on those negative thoughts, I imagined myself with a baseball bat and every time the negative thougths came to my mind I would swing the bat "NO, my thighs are NOT fat!" "NO, I'm NOT shaped like tub of lard, I'm shaped like a WOMAN!"
It only took a couple of months I swear to you, but the negative thoughts hardly ever come up anymore, and when they do I swing the bat. Now when I unexpectedly see my reflection in a store window my instinct says "wow, sexy mamma, look at those curves!!" I kid you not, I wouldn't have believed it if I didn't experience this first hand. It IS possible to think of yourself beautiful, you just have to attack those negative thoughts that are like a disease taking over your mind, it's not reality.