A few months ago i tried on a dress and it looked awful. Whilst standing in the changing room with those special downcast lights purposefully designed to increase the shadows left by the bags under your eyes and accentuate every rise and fall of cellulite that you have slowly but surely accumulated over your life, I looked at my reflection and when "eeeuuuugggghhh". I didn't like what i saw. Then i started to think. I realized that for a lot of my life I have not liked my body. I have spent years criticising my arse, my hips, my thighs, my calves and my poor, poor stomach who get's the brunt end of it all. There was very little I liked and it had been this way for as long as i can remember, at least 15 years.
What a total bloody waste of time!
Years ago I couldn’t walk down to the beach for a swim without wrapping myself in my towel. Then I went traveling and gained my self confidence thanks to meeting some amazingly fantastic women who would be classed as larger/curvier/whatever who were filled with confidence and didn’t appear to care what others thought. I admired them and decided that I would much rather be like that instead if too afraid of someone criticizing my arse!
Then I got pregnant and it all changed. I felt great being pregnant and wasn’t so bothered about the fact that my belly ballooned to gigantic proportions. What I did notice was that any admiring glances once received were no longer received. It appears that a pregnant women is no longer viewed as sexy or attractive! Then I had emmeline and noticed that no one really admires a women carrying a baby or pushing a pram. It is like we have gone from being sexy, attractive women to simply being a mom. I have to say that this is not what we need! We already feel so bad about ourselves and out bodies that we don’t need to be made to feel even more undesireable. Once I had emmeline I found it hard to shift the weight. My appetite had not decreased perhaps because I was breastfeeding, perhaps simply because I am in love with food. I couldn’t do exercise because I was either too exhausted or because I was with her all day – no time for spining! I didn’t like my body, nor my newly acquired mummy tummy. As the months went by, I started to feel worse about my body and less confidence. It started to affect my life more than I liked. The first time I went to the swimming pool with emmeline I was so embarrassed as I only had a bikini and I was worried about my body and what people would think. When I went with some of the other mommies to a swimming pool, I was embarrassed again with my body. I was wearing big baggy clothing and not buying anything sexy as I didn’t feel it. Then while walking with emmeline one day, something in my head went “ping”. 5 Years ago I was bigger than I am today and I was super confident. Why not now? Why did I lose it? Simply because my tummy is even more flabby than before or because I put on a few extra kilos? Rubbish to that! I have every ‘right’ to be just a confident as the skinny minny with the washboard tummy across the road, every ‘right’ to wear skinny jeans and every ‘right’ to wear a fitted vest with confidence and without embarrassment. I found some of my self confidence again!
Now whilst I haven't liked my body since i was a teenager (sometimes more, sometimes less), it has always been constant. And I am not alone in this. Pretty much ALL women are not happy with how they look.
WHY? WHY? WHY? WHY? What is wrong with us?
If our partners get a little tummy, we think it is cute, soft and cuddly. If they get one slightly tiny eye wrinkle we wouldn't even notice it. Grey hairs? Sophisticated. If the same things happens to us we are automatically placing ourselves on the lemon juice and cinnamon diet, rushing out to spend a months rent on wrinkle creams that probably wont make that much of a difference, and buying stocks in L'Oreal . . . because we are worth it!
It's Bullshit.
Why are we so hard on ourselves? Perhaps partly because everyone else is! We are surrounded by messages and images about how we should look. I put on the TV and Brooke Shields is telling me how much younger she now looks using product x, Jennifer Lopez is telling me how amazing her hair now looks since she started to use product x, Jessica Alba's face is now flawless due to product x and Scarlett Johannsen smells fantastic due to using product x. I go into a shop to try and buy a pair of knee high boots. Now if your calves (like mine) are not dainty little twigs, you are screwed and the zips don’t go all the way up. So off I go to buy some clothing to perk myself up. I pop into H&M and I am a Medium. On a high I pop over to Mango or Zara and discover that a Large or X Large only just about squeezes over the hills and mountains of my hips and breasts. Defeated I leave. I want to grab a coffee from Starbucks, but feel like i am being a pig if I order a big coffee and milk and not a skinny, decaf, no milk, no sugar, no skim, no fat, no froth, coffee that has no calories and is actually just air. So I grab a magazine to have a quick read on the bus on the way home. Page one tells me all about Jordan's antics (honestly, I don't care, this is no longer news. News would be when Jordan has a marriage that lasts or spends a night in). Page 5 tells me GLEEFULLY how Kate Moss has cellulite. This is aimed to make us mere mortals feel better, more normal and accepted. Page 8 tut tuts that some poor B lister has "let herself go" and is now up to a size 14-16. Page 10 is shocked, worried and concerned at how much weight Misha Barton has lost. Page 11 thinks Misha Barton is fat. Page 15 claims someone has slimed down to a "curvy" size 10. Page 18 tells us Katie Holmes is pregnant because her washboard flat stomach has a pea sized bulge or because she is wearing a floaty shirt. Page 25 mockingly shows us celebrities without makeup and page 28 blows us Katy Perry's zit so that is takes up the whole page. And it has been circled just incase we didn't realize what we were looking at.
We are totally screwed!
Magazines aimed at women are ALL about size and image criticizing us for being too small, criticizing us for being too big, mocking women who have cellulite or criticizing them when they don’t wear make up. Are we all just a big bunch of bitches or is this some kind of conspiracy theory manufactured by the beauty industry to get us to keep spending all out money like a bunch of idiots with all this crap to make ourselves 'look better'.
The truth is that there is no perfect anything or anyone. Pick the person that you think is perfect and ask them if there is anything they don’t like about themselves, and I guarantee you they will have at least one thing they don’t like . . . even if it is just their earlobes! Go down to the beach and take a look around, we come in all shapes and sizes, filled with perfections and imperfections. We will still find and keep friends, we will still find and keep partners, we will still fall in love and have people fall in love with us. But For some bizarre and unexplained reason we appear to be programmed to not be happy with ourselves. If you want to try to make a change to yourself for health reasons then go for it, but please, not because Cosmopolitan say so!!
It’s just NOT worth it.
