The following is a guest post by Adam Appleson, author of Zen Tactics.
Have you ever been to a funhouse and seen yourself in all those funny mirrors? One minute you’re incredibly tall and the next you’re incredibly short. Those mirrors twist up your body image in all different kinds of ways. Of course, you know these mirrors are meant to do that so it’s easy to dismiss the image of yourself in those funhouse mirrors as completely distorted. But is the image you have of yourself when you look in the mirror distorted? And what does this have to do with sabotaging your weight loss efforts?
Let’s look at a bunch of college-aged women in the dining halls of Amherst College.
A psychologist studied what happened when these women would file into the dining hall for a meal and noticed their eyes would be checking out what other women had on their dining trays to help them stay from foods they wanted to eat but feel they should not. The psychologist called this phenomenon “tray gazing.”
But what drove these women to behave in such a manner and why can tray gazing be dangerous? As it turns out, each woman thought the others were thinner, exercised more, and were more obsessed with their body image than they were themselves. In fact, there were no real differences among the women. What made this distortion in self-image dangerous is that about one-third of the women who held this belief engaged in induced vomiting or purges. This habit is the pre-cursor to life-threatening eating disorders such as bulimia. Even more interesting, the women’s diets became more extreme the more erroneous their assumptions about the other women’s attitudes were.
But how can a bunch of incredibly smart and talented young women make such bad judgment calls?
As it turns out, it has to do with something we all do on a daily basis – social comparison. The women tended to focus on the most attractive women (think supermodel) rather than the normal or true average. The result was they ended up viewing the extreme end of the bell curve as the norm.
So how can you prevent this kind of distorted self-image as you’re trying to lose a few pounds?
1) Stop comparing yourself to others. Some people are just going to be thinner than others due to innate differences. As the serenity prayer states,
God grant me the serenity
to accept the things I cannot change;
courage to change the things I can;
and wisdom to know the difference.
2) Accept yourself as you are already. When you look in the mirror and feel de-motivated, it’s like saying “I’m not good enough”. You’re engaging in the kind of thinking that leads to “tray gazing.” Your weight is just an interaction of your diet, genes, and exercise habits, nothing more, nothing less. It shouldn’t define you as a person. Remind yourself why you like yourself and are a good person.
3) Surround yourself with positive influences. Grab some motivational tapes and listen to them each morning. I did this as I was training for a marathon and it always helped me stay focused on the goal of fitting in a solid training run (and yes, I did cross the finish line).
4) Emphasize health over looks. The healthiest kind of weight loss is the kind you’re doing for health reasons, like lowering your cholesterol or teaching yourself healthy eating habits. When you do it for looks, it’s like you’re telling yourself you’re not good enough.
5) Make the weight loss about something bigger than yourself. Lose weight so you can be around for your kids longer. Do it so you can be a good example of a healthy lifestyle to the students you may teach in your class. Vanity should be the last reason to do it for.
It’s ok to lose weight to “look good” if that’s what motivates you.
Just don’t lose your healthy self-image in the process. As the tray gazing study showed, sometimes there’s a lot of funhouse mirrors in your head that can play havoc with the way you see yourself. So cut yourself a break as you try and lose a few pounds. You’re good enough as you are – with or without the extra pounds. Isn’t that a message worth spreading?
Adam Appleson is the founder of Zen Tactics, a website that helps child abuse survivors develop practical personal development skills. Adam also offers the free report, Why Are You Unhappy?: How To Create Happiness Through Friendship If You’re An Abuse Survivor, written especially for child abuse survivors trying to create happiness in their lives.
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