I have a little theory about body image that I’ve never written down before and here it is:
Women (and men?) have an image of themselves based on one or two body parts that concern them.
One rare day when the husband had joined me on a shopping trip I stepped out of a changing cubicle to show him an outfit in front of the main mirror. He pointed out that my eyes always went directly to my stomach – that bit of my body that makes me most self-conscious. And he’s right. My belly is really what I’m changing when I’m losing weight and that’s where my eyes go when I’m looking in the mirror.
Not long after that, the media began chattering about Calista Flockhart’s weight and it started me wondering if she was trying to diet her round face into a different shape.
Then I took my perfectly shaped young teenaged daughter shopping. My strongest childhood clothes shopping memories are of being the overweight child weeping my way through the “Chubbies” section of Sears with my distraught mother. Later I become the overweight teen trying to find clothes that looked as good on me as they did on my thin friends. (But that’s another blog entry.)
So I was so looking forward to taking my tall, slim gorgeous young teen shopping for clothes. When she came out to show me her first outfit I noticed her looking down towards the bottom of the mirror rather than at the whole stunning “look”. Her reason? “I hate that fat on my feet.”
I kid you not! She has a little pad of fat on the top of her feet near the ankle – weird but true – and that’s all she could see. Not the perfect little curves or the flat tummy or the overall stunning effect.
So what’s your “flaw” – the one body part that upsets you most? Does your body image revolve around that one imperfect part?
Oddly perhaps, I don’t worry about my flaws when I see myself naked. The curves seem to all be in the right place and they make sense on a female body. But clothes just never hang right and the whole exercise becomes about hiding the stomach area. Even when I’m not overweight, I still instinctively look and criticise every bump and roll around my middle. I KNOW they won’t all disappear unless I diet myself into oblivion (à la Calista) so I guess I’d better work on acceptance – appreciation even. (Yet another topic!)
There are two ironies in this story.
The first is that, while I’ve been worrying about my stomach, people have been looking at my legs – which are a lovely gift from my mother. An old friend once told me how jealous of me she’d been in high school because of my thin muscular legs. All I could do was laugh and tell her how jealous I’d been of her flat stomach. Girls.
The other irony is that, now that I’ve gone some way towards losing that belly, just about every top hanging in the stores looks like it was designed to conceal a seventh month pregnancy. Where were they when I needed them? Why did I have to suffer the advent of “skinny tees” and “cropped tees” and “low rise jeans”? Hey? Answer me that, fashion industry.
Oh well, I’d suppose I’d rather have unsuitable clothing on the shelves than unsuitable fat on my belly.
As always, I’m a work in progress. More on this tomorrow.