Wow it is zooming up there on me isn’t it?

Have you ever watched the TV show “How to love yourself naked?”   I watched the Oprah special on the show and was quite amazed at how we see our bodies compared to how others see us.  So I decided to watch a couple of the shows for myself.   It has that Carson fellow from Queer Eye on it and he is really quite good on the show which surprised me cause I normally don’t like him.

The show does not just look at fluffies but also at skinnies because they too have distorted body image and that was also a surprise to me as I thought only fluffies like me obsessed with all their faults, but not so…

It is amazing that what we see in the mirror is so often not what others see, we often see ourselves as so much heavier than others do or than we actually are in real life.  Carson does a little test where he has a bunch of women of different sizes in a row (all in bra and panties) and the person who is learning to love themselves naked have to place themselves between where they feel they belong size wise amongst the women.  Everytime the women place themselves way too high, often adding 3 to as many as 6 inches onto their hips or waist sizes.  When Carson moves them to where they belong and they compare with the other women they are shocked and really quite happy to see they are smaller than what they imagined they were.    He also has their bodies in bra and panties on public display and people comment on it, and the comments are amazing and most flattering.

So our perception is often not what others see.  We look in the mirror and see wrinkles and cellulite and rolls and bags and sags, but others do not see that.  I asked my husband tonight to tell me what he sees when he looks at me, and he said, “I see knock out eyes, gorgeous hair and a nice rack!”  “I love your waist and you have a great butt”  “Strong calves too, I like that”

I see, wrinkles around the eyes, grey in the hair, a thick waist with a floppy belly, a larger than life butt with far too much cellulite and too fat calves.  And my boobs are like uninflated balloons, flat and lifeless.

Wow, it is like we are seeing and talking about two different people.

I listened to these women on the show cry because they hated themselves so much and then I watched the transformation as they learned to love the bodies they had and the skin they were in, and they did not lose weight or get plastic surgery, they learned to love who they were and what they were, to feel alive and happy with the body they have now and the skin they were in now………

Carson said, “how can you expect anyone to love you when you do not love yourself?”

How true is that?

Like soclose says, “this is not rocket science”