It is a gallery of photos of women of all different heights and weights and you can search for pictures of people with your same stats. It sounds weird and I thought I was going to be very depressed but I actually found the opposite. It made me feel a little better about my current body size.
See, I never worried about my weight or looks growing up. Beauty was always an odd concept to me and even now when somebody compliments my looks (which fortunately for me doesn't happen too often) I am not quite sure how to respond. Ex: "You have nice eyes." "Thanks...I grew them myself?" It's like complimenting someone on their height. They didn't really choose it or have much to do with it so how do you take credit for it? And weight wise I was maybe a little bigger than my friends but not enough to be made fun of or take much notice, so I never worried about it. Which was good because I had a kind of angst-y adolescence as it was so at least I didn't have to add self-esteem problems to the mix.
However, after going on a mission and eating copious amounts of Mexican food every day and packing on the pounds as a result and then graduating from college and getting depressed about not finding a job for 18 months and drowning my problems in too much food and not exercising or even sweating out a few calories by hiking up to campus everyday and then worrying about how I'm still single and probably will be forever because nobody finds fat, self-pittying "elderly" women attractive, I find that all of a sudden I have some self-esteem issues. Now, this is not to say that I am overcome by depression and self-loathing, and I am definitely NOT crying out for attention or begging you to tell me that I am gorgeous (I wouldn't believe you anyway. Cute I might believe. Gorgeous no.) Rather, it is just to say that I was really lucky for a long time not to have to worry about my image because overall I felt pretty good about myself. And I still do, I just find that lately I have been a little harder on myself than I have in the past.
And I have wondered what I would think of myself if I was somebody else and saw me. Would I think I was fat and grotesque or would I even notice that? So when I stumbled across this website and started looking at photos of girls who look like me I was pleasantly surprised. I think most of them look pretty good. So that must mean that I look ok too. And that made me feel better. I know it is cliche to say that they don't show girls who look like me in magazines and on tv but as I was looking at these other women I found myself thinking, "Hey, these girls look normal. They are what I see in real life every day." So then I didn't feel quite so bad about not looking like (insert waifish movie star name here).
So. There is my rant on my self-esteem issues. I'm sure you all wanted to be my internet psychologists and listen to me be self absorbed, right : ) But I figured that if I found the website to be so helpful then I ought to at least share it with the rest of you. You can consider my opinions of myself as an extra bonus :) Now if you'll excuse me I have to get my squishy, jiggly self to bed. I need my beauty rest you know ;)
*Update* So after posting this yesterday I read it again today and started to get paranoid that I was sharing too much info or weirding people out or something, which was definitely not the point. Mostly I think I just wanted to say I found the site that I linked to highly interesting and enlightening. I think in my head I am always comparing myself to people skinnier than me so of course I feel bad that I don't meet those standards. So when I looked at that sight and compared myself to people who looked like me I was judging myself in a less harsh light and was surprised by the results. Maybe you don't have this problem so none of it is relevant and you are thinking "Linds, you are just weird and I don't know what to make of this post." That's ok. I guess just consider it the price of reading my blog...sometimes you have to wade through the weird areas of my head to get to the good stuff (if there is good stuff...probably its all weird. But that's ok, there is a big underground of weirdness out there so maybe its relevant to somebody.)
Anyway, I also wanted to link to another site that I found fascinating. It shows pictures of people and tells whether they are underweight, normal, overweight, obese or morbidly obese according to their BMI. I won't go in to details about my problems with the BMI or my rant about the obesity "epidemic" right now because that would take forever and you don't want to get me started. But do check out this link:
And feel free to tell me what you think, whether it is that I am off my rocker or should just quit worrying about beauty rest and try to just get enough rest to keep my frantic mind from going off on bizarre themes : )
1 comment:
That website was very interesting. I have to agree about the constantly comparing myself to people skinnier than I am. I, sadly, have done that since I was a young teenager, as I got made fun of one time by my cousins for my jiggling thighs as I ran when I was quite young and felt self-conscious about it afterwards. Really just ridiculous that I still fall into that trap. So there you go, you can be my internet psychiatrist too. :)
I laugh so hard at the BMI. Mostly because it would consider Justin to be nearly obese. The guy doesn't have hardly any fat on him, lol. Anything that has the potential to measure so off is not something I'm about to give much credit!
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